


Lazarus Writing

by jemariel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (don't worry no one you know dies), (not used), (sorry), Anal Sex, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Dean Winchester, Bottom!Cas, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Comfortably Bisexual Dean Winchester, Destiel - Freeform, FaceFucking, Gay Castiel, Ghosts?, Human Castiel, M/M, Magic, Minor Character Death, Oral Sex, Rough Oral Sex, Safer Sex, Sam Winchester is a genius, Sex Toys, Sexually Experienced Castiel, Switch Castiel, Switch Dean, Topping from the Bottom, Writer AU, Zombies?, dean/cas - Freeform, submissive top, team everyone switches forever, top!dean, who knows!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-01-27 10:53:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 39,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12580144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jemariel/pseuds/jemariel
Summary: Written for Rosemoonweaver's Fic-O-Ween challenge!After months of writer's block, Castiel is just glad his newest story seem to be going smoothly. He's never had characters come to life so easily as Sam and Dean Winchester.After a suspicious gift from his publisher, that turns out to be more literal than he thought......A story for writers, and for anyone who's ever been afraid.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for @rosemoonweaver's Fic-O-Ween challenge, thanks for the excellent prompt!
> 
> Special thanks to my Cas-girl family for listening to me moan about this story for the last few weeks... You guys are the best!

October 18th

**[typing noises]**

**[delete delete]**

**[typing. pause. type, type]**

Sigh.

**[delete delete]**

“Come on, Novak. Get your head in the game.”

**[slow typing, delete, type, delete, keyboard smash]**

Laptop slammed closed with force, wireless mouse chucked across the room. Castiel stood, grabbed a scarf and a jacket and fled the scene.

~*~

Autumn was Castiel’s favorite season. He loved how the scent of blown out candles seemed to hover in the air for weeks. He loved how those first chilly breezes made the lush leaves of summer curl in on themselves with a shivering rattle. He loved the patter of silver-gray rain on the window, on the surface of a puddle, on his upturned face.

Autumn was also the best season for writing. It was an excellent time to hole up in a cafe or in his writing nook for hours and dive into his story. But this year... This year, the words just would not cooperate.

Castiel Novak, modestly successful author of no fewer than 5 Julie Chase mysteries and 2 stand-alone pulp sci-fi novels, under contract for more of both, was suffering from writer’s block so severe, he’d been toying with the idea of doing NaNoWriMo just to try and push himself past it.

He wasn’t sure that would help, though. A fifty thousand word sprint of drivel wouldn’t fix the issue, which was that every time he came up with an idea, he hated it within a week. Characters that started out interesting and fun would turn into flat cardboard cutouts. Scenarios that seemed ripe with possibility failed to produce anything of substance. It was all trite nonsense, everything ripped off from somewhere else, and he didn’t know how to fix it.

There were only so many head-clearing walks a person could take; already the neighborhood cats were starting to learn his route.

He was just contemplating whether or not to bother checking the mail on his way back when his phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. “GOD,” the screen read. Castiel rolled his eyes -- his publisher. The very last person he wanted to talk to right now... but it would probably do more harm than good in the long run to put this off. So he thumbed the screen and held the phone to his ear.

“Hi Chuck,” he sighed.

“Novak! My favorite wayward author...”

Castiel’s brow pinched. “Wayward?”

“Did you get my package?”

Well. That at least made one decision easier. “I was just about to check my mail,” he said.

“Now, it’s nothing big, but I thought it might help get the ball rolling on a few things,” Chuck said. “How’s the manuscript coming, by the way?”

Castiel pursed his lips. Bastard just dropped that question so casual-like, totally unaware of the pit of anxiety he’d just dropped into Castiel’s stomach. “It’s, um --” he stopped as his keys slipped from his grip and clanged on the pavement. “-- sonuva -- It’s going fine!” He squeaked, standing up and nearly fumbling his keys again trying to get the right one into the mail box one-handed.

“Uh-huh. I’m sure it is. Listen,” Chuck sounded rightly skeptical. “You know you’re my favorite, right?”

“Bet you say that to all the nice girls,” Castiel groused.

“But Novak. I gotta have something to read! You wanna strike while the Julie Chase iron’s hot, you know? Before you’re shuffled off into Pastel Hell. You do not want to disappear into the ocean of romance shlock, you know that, right?”

Castiel was too busy wrestling with a mid-sized package, along with a mess of coupons, bills, and various charity newsletters to answer that. Of course Chuck wanted more Julie Chase. Didn’t matter that Castiel had been ready to shove Julie Chase into the fireplace two books ago. No matter that even if he didn’t know what he wanted to write next, the idea that it would have to be Julie Chase was like sucking on a sour, juiceless lemon.

“What about that pulp deal I signed?” He asked. “I’ve been working more on that lately.” It was a lie, but one that might at least get him out of the frying pan.

Chuck’s sigh echoed down the line, all static. “Novak, look. It’s not that I don’t want to see what you’ll come up with next; believe me, I’m all ears. It’s that we’ve extended the JC deadline twice already. I need a couple chapters at least or you’re gonna lose your contract.”

Castiel closed his eyes and wrestled his way into the apartment building and started up the stairs, package and papers firmly tucked under one arm. ‘JC.’ Of course.

“Listen,” Chuck continued. “I’ll give you til the end of the month. If you can give me some movement at the pulp presses by then, I’ll work with the House on the JC front. But if I don’t see pages, I want Julie ready to package and print by the end of the year. Got it?”

Castiel’s eyes almost bugged out of their sockets. “Chuck, that’s not --”

“Hey, Stephen King does it. You get my package?”

He tossed the mess of mail onto the coffee table amongst the several similar piles, then held up the package for inspection. ‘Chuck Shurley, CE Publishers.’ It was a flattish, squarish paper package with no other identifying marks. “Yeah, I got it,” he said.

He could hear the grin on Chuck’s face when he spoke next; it was unnerving. “Just a little something to get your juices flowing. Listen, I gotta go. Ciao! Get me those pages!”

“Chuck, hold on a-” But he was gone.

With a sigh, Castiel tossed the phone on the sofa and sat down. That had thoroughly defeated any comfort he might have enjoyed after his walk. Nothing for it now. He held the package in his lap and carefully peeled the tape -- for about 5 seconds before getting fed up and ripping through the thick brown paper.

It was... a journal. Not particularly fancy, but obviously high quality, well-bound in leather with a closure flap. It had a few strange runes stamped on the spine, and under the closure was a ballpoint pen made of some kind of heavy, dark wood. When Castiel inspected the first pages he found the words “Bring new life to your writing” scrawled in blue below some kind of insignia. Looked like the same runes as the ones on the spine, several of them arranged in a circle. Some sort of brand logo?

But ultimately, it was, of course, just a journal. Castiel frowned at it with a tilt of his head. He rarely wrote by hand -- he knew some authors who did but Castiel found it slow, uncomfortable, and inefficient. He craned his neck to look over the back of the sofa toward his writing nook -- technically intended for breakfast, he’d set it up as his designated writing spot. Lots of windows, a few different chairs so he could change his view as he needed, space on the table for books, photos, doodads, fidgetty knicknacks, whatever he needed -- and his laptop, currently closed where he had slammed it shut in frustration earlier.

Rolling his head back down the top of the sofa, Castiel examined the journal again. Perhaps a change of tool was worth experimenting with. At least for the brainstorming phase. It couldn’t hurt.

He stood, stretched his back, and carried the journal over to his nook. He cleared a space, set it down, and settled himself in the chair.

From the view out the window, he’d made it back to his apartment just in time. He could see a gentle rain pattering through the leaves that were just starting to glow a true autumn gold. The raindrops bent them down toward the street, pattered softly at the windowpane. The light was just right; the wind a quiet susurrus around him. Castiel breathed in and out a few times, slowly. Getting his bearings. He wished he’d made himself a cup of coffee, but recognized that for the stalling tactic that it was. Instead of getting up, he closed his eyes, picked up the pen, and set the nib to paper.

_It all started with the house fire, the night she died...._

~*~

By the time Castiel put down the pen, it was full twilight, the street outside a study in contrast between the rich velvet blue of the sky and the brassy aura of the street lamp. Castiel stretched his cramping wrist and shoulder -- there was definitely a reason he didn’t write by hand much -- but smiled and flipped through the dozen or so pages he’d put down. Most of it was backstory and world-building, character study, things that wouldn’t be necessary to include in the actual story but were good for him to have under his belt.

John Winchester was an interesting guy, but as he’d scribbled and scratched, his stream of consciousness had flowed more and more swiftly in the direction of his sons -- Sam and Dean Winchester. He liked them. He _felt_ them, like he was starting to get a sense for who they were as people, how their dynamic would flow, how to use them to create tension in the story. He’d rarely had characters come to life so easily, and after weeks of struggling this was like the relief of that first rain after summer drought. Maybe there was something to this whole journal thing.

With a satisfied sigh, Castiel stood and moved into the kitchen to fix himself that coffee -- maybe a bit late for it but he was in the sort of groove where he could easily see two in the morning and still want to put words on the page. He grinned, shaking his head over the grounds as he scooped them into the pot. He wasn’t quite sure where all this had come from when just a few hours earlier he had been lamenting his blockages and staring down the barrel of two months of hateful, frantic Julie Chase drudgery. Maybe it was the sense of threat lighting a fire under his ass. Maybe it was the change of tools. Whatever. He wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

While waiting for his coffee to brew, Castiel mused about his new characters. Sam was the “Good one” for lack of better terminology. Smart, logical, compassionate, he fancied himself the moral compass of the duo. He was the type who was utterly convinced that he was doing the right things for the right reasons, and Castiel couldn’t wait to turn that on its head. Dean, on the other hand...

Dean was more interesting to Castiel. It wasn’t that he had any less of a moral compass; it was that his priorities were different. He was less concerned with the over-arching conflict between Good and Evil and more focused on keeping his family safe, whatever the cost. He was a nurturer at heart, with a rough tough-guy exterior. And if he was more than a little bit of wish-fulfillment for the author, well... no one needed to know that. So he wanted to write about a cute bad boy with a heart of gold in a leather jacket. Sue him. It had been a while.

He’d be straight though. Some of Castiel’s out-and-proud author friends would give him hell for this sort of thing, but Castiel knew the score. Unless you stuck firmly to a pretty specific set of roles, including a gay main character was a sure-fire way to get your book shunted into the “Special interests” section where mainstream readers dared not tread. Castiel wasn’t out to change the world, and just because he happened to be gay didn’t mean it was his job. He was no hero. His books were average at best; he just wanted to get them out there where somebody might read them.

Behind him, the coffee pot burbled and hissed its final spits into the pot. With a little shake, Castiel prepared himself a cup and sat back down behind the journal. Opened it up to a fresh page. Took a few slow sips of warm, sweetly-bitter beverage. Blinked out at the darkening world outside the window, now Halloween-black and orange with nightfall. Then he picked up the pen. Time for the plot.

~*~

October 27th

Are you an architect? Or a gardener?

People asked this sometimes, referring to the supposed two broad classes of brains among wordsmiths. The meticulous planners, the architects, who laid everything out with blueprint specificity before ever setting word to page. Analytical, efficient, accused of being overly cold and clinical. Versus the softer touch of the gardeners: those who would let the story flow organically from their fingertips, uncovering new characters and plot threads as they went along, not overly concerned with where the story took them so long as they enjoyed the journey.

For Castiel, neither metaphor had ever really rung true (and he privately thought that was true of most writers). If pressed, he would say he was neither: He was a sculptor.

For Castiel, coming up with a story was like groping in the dark and unearthing some raw lump of material. Bringing it into the light. Examining it from all sides. Hewing off rough chunks, hacking out the shape of the thing, pulling pieces out and sticking them on somewhere else, putting them back, then removing them altogether, but leaving their negative space. Slowly, using finer and finer tools for the details, smoothing out the edges. The shape and hue of the story would appear, Castiel revealing the truth within the stone by virtue of his labor.

At least, that was the ideal. Sometimes, of course, he wanted to shatter the thing against a wall. Stories were frustratingly immaterial that way, no matter what metaphor one used to describe one’s “process.”

It had been a week, and Castiel had little to show for it but some over-indulgent back-story, a few half-baked plot threads, and the first two chapters of the cheesiest X-Files ripoff since X-Files itself. He’d tried to remind himself that this was a completely natural and expected part of writing, but it wasn’t helping much. He was stuck again, and worse, he’d wasted a week on drivel that he was tempted now to burn, bury, and salt the earth over.

Maybe they were right, he thought as he dug around for his keys. The thought seeped slowly through his stomach, cold and nauseating. Maybe he should just bank on Julie Chase for as long as she would sell, which, given the genre, could be the rest of his life. Maybe he should forget about his aspirations to move beyond that and nestle himself into a comfy, cramped little pigeon hole and be thankful that at least he was making money off his work.

And maybe if he did that he would be dead of boredom before he hit 35.

He shook himself. Later. Right now he had some Real Life errands to attend to, and Hannah was waiting. He turned to the fridge -- “Damn.” -- only to find his notepad for shopping lists was empty. Fine. He glanced around, his eyes falling on the journal sitting on his table, the damn thing that had started all this.

Without a second thought, he flipped to the back of the journal and wrote out:

_Shopping list notes_  
_Coffee_  
_Eggs_  
_New razor_  
_Apples_  
_Ground beef_  
_Milk_

He paused for a moment, then added to the bottom of the list:

_Lube_

Because a lonely gay man could not be forgetting that. With a loud shredding sound he ripped the page from the back of the book, folded and tucked it into his pocket, and dashed out the door.

Thus, Castiel was not there to witness the quiet whisper of impossible wind that fluttered the pages of the journal, nor the quiet pops like soap bubbles bursting through the apartment. He was not there to sense the fine mist of magic that settled over the apartment before fading into the ether.

~*~

“Hello Castiel.” Castiel’s oldest friend greeted him with a huge smile and a hug before leading him inside the nursing home suite. Castiel stepped gingerly on the meticulously-vacuumed carpet. This place always sort of gave him the creeps. The staff obviously tried to make it as pleasant as possible, but that almost made it worse. He felt like he was in the sort of dystopia that disguised itself as a haven but God help you if you walked on the grass.

Nevertheless, Hannah’s grandmother seemed to like it well enough. Mostly.

“Is that Novak? Tell him to stop tiptoeing around the begonias and get in here and give me a kiss!” Grandma Louise Hartsmith was a stooped, frail bird of a woman with a crow-squawk voice to match, but her eyes pierced like glass and her tongue would flay you alive. Hannah doted on her Grandma Louise, and Grandma Louise adored Castiel. Castiel... tolerated these visits with as much grace as he could muster.

“Hello Louise,” he said with an easy smile. “I brought you a present.”

“Best present you can give me is a smooch, young man! It’s my birthday; I’ve earned it!”

Castiel sighed and leaned down to brush a quick purse-lipped kiss on Louise’s cheek; she responded by grabbing his head in both hands and planting a big wet one right next to his lips. He counted himself lucky that it wasn’t ON the lips this time and leaned back quickly. “Here you go,” he said, thrusting the brightly-wrapped package into her hands.

His gift of a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of a photo of some picturesque Scottish ruin went over well. They chatted amiably, made the appropriate noises in response to the surprisingly rich gossip of the assisted living community and reminded Grandma Louise once again that no, Castiel was simply Hannah’s friend and they would not be getting married.

Then it happened, as Castiel knew it would. Because Grandma Louise wasn’t just a dear friend’s grandmother. She was also a fan.

“Now Mr Novak -- when in blue blazes am I going to get another story about Miss Chase out of you? Hmm? Am I still going to be alive? Eh? My eyesight’s keen today but who the hell knows what’s coming down the pipe. I might wake up blind tomorrow. Oh!” Her bright blue eyes widened with some joyous realization. “You’d have to come read it to me! Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Castiel grit his teeth and sighed. “Yes -- You know, Louise, there’s no guarantee -- I’m actually working on something else right now --”

“Tish tosh. I want Miss Chase! She’s a darling and she’s so clever and cheeky and she’s just what a young woman needs these days, don’t you agree, Hannah?”

Hannah glanced between her grandmother and Castiel, looking somewhere between amused and nervous. “Well, um. I like them just fine, but --” Castiel widened his eyes at her, trying to scream ‘TRAITOR’ as loud as he could without saying anything. “-- But I’ll read anything you want to write, you know that Castiel!” she finished with a bright grin. “And I’m sure you’ll enjoy it too, Grandma.”

Grandma Louise just huffed and reached for her lukewarm tea, muttering something about why she couldn’t have nice things.

~*~

Castiel’s mood was not at all improved by the time he shouldered his way back into his apartment, groceries in arms. If anything, he’d spent the intervening hours only becoming more and more bitter about the fact that no one seemed to care what he wanted to write. They just wanted him to shit out the same old shlock. Wasn’t this job supposed to be done for the joy of it? It wasn’t like he wanted to write the Great American Novel or anything; he just wanted to write something original. Something meaningful, something _true._

But the sad truth was that nothing was original and that truth and meaning were in the eye of the beholder. The more and more he thought about it, the more he wondered why it was so important to him that he do something different? What did he think he could do in a new novel that he couldn’t do in a Julie Chase story? Maybe he was shoving himself in his own box.

He set down the grocery bags on the counter and stared blankly at his writing nook. Well. You know what they say. Kill your darlings.

Castiel picked up the journal and flipped back through the pages he’d written. There was very little actual story here -- just outlining and scene breakdowns, bits and pieces of dialogue, snapshots. He liked these boys. He really did. But they were going nowhere fast, and he didn’t have time to follow them.

So he pinched the first few pages between his fingers and, with a moment’s wincing hesitation, ripped the pages out close to the spine. He kept ripping in twos and fours until he had removed all the pages with writing on them, then gathered them up, took a deep breath, and dropped them in a disarrayed sheaf in the recycling bin. The black ink of his own blocky scrawl stared up at him reprovingly. He turned his back; he knew he was being foolish. He could always reincarnate Sam and Dean in another setting if he really missed them that much.

Suddenly a great gust of wind whipped around his apartment building, wuthering loudly in the eaves and bending the tree outside his window nearly in half. Yellow leaves tore off in clusters, some of them taking their twigs along for the ride. The window by the writing nook crashed open on its hinges and frigid air washed over Castiel like icy water. With a curse and a shiver he wrangled the window shut, and watched the wind outside die down as quickly as it had come. In a few moments, all was still again, except for a vague tingle on his skin like a mild electric shock.

Castiel shook his head -- autumn was weird like that sometimes -- and went back to the kitchen to unpack the groceries.

A flash of paper-white on the fridge caught his attention. Huh. He’d been sure that he’d been out of shopping list notes. He squinted at the full pad, brand new, right there on the fridge, bold as brass. He must have missed it earlier? Or something. He raised an eyebrow at the full pad in suspicion. “I’m watching you,” he said, pointing an accusing finger at the notes.

Then he turned to put the apples in the fruit bowl, and stopped again. Apples. Okay. He frowned. Those had definitely not been there before. On closer inspection he found that they were Honeycrisp apples, which was the kind he had wanted but at the last minute he had purchased the cheaper Braeburns instead. Which is what he held in his hand. Slowly, as if they might explode on contact like matter and antimatter, Castiel emptied the bag of Braeburns on top of the Honeycrisps. They nearly overflowed his fruit bowl.

Still frowning, Castiel turned and inspected his fridge. Eggs. Milk. Ground beef. Cupboard? Coffee. His confusion mounting, he darted down the hall to the bathroom -- new razor -- and the bedroom -- personal lubricant, tucked into the bedside drawer.

“What the _hell,_ ” Castiel demanded of his possessions. Was this some new form of early-onset dementia? He must have gone shopping and forgotten about it -- and been selectively blind to those specific items before going out that day.

A quick check of his bank balance put paid to that idea. There was only one shopping trip as his most recent transaction, for the exact amount he remembered paying.

One thing that was not in his cupboards, however, was the package of cookies that Castiel had picked up on a whim. He stood in his kitchen chewing on a pecan sandy because he didn’t trust any of his other food, considering. Slowly, he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the crumpled list. The contents of this list -- the _exact_ items he had had in mind when he’d jotted it down -- seemed to have spontaneously appeared in his kitchen.

Alright. Definitely going mad.

There had to be a rational explanation for this, but... what?

Fighting back his unease, Castiel finished putting away his groceries -- placing each item to the left of its mysterious duplicate so that he could be sure of which was which later. Then, shaking his head at himself, he sat down with his laptop -- the journal was banished to the far side of the table with a suspicious glare -- and tried to focus on Julie Chase.

It was barely half an hour later that he gave it up for a supremely lost cause. Bed. Yeah. Early night. That’s what this called for.

~*~

If Castiel thought sleep was going to come easily, he had been sorely mistaken. But come it did, like a velvet sheaf over his eyes. His dreams at first were of warm wind, like sticking your arm out a car window on a summer day. He dreamed of rolling fields and roads, of green and gold and bright laughter.

Then all at once the wind turned cold, the laughter cruel. Gold tarnished to ashen white, and the roads all twisted back in on themselves, a Gordian knot of back-tracks and dead ends. The icy chill of that wind drove relentless needles into his bones and he woke shivering, ready to shake apart from terror.

In his half-sleeping state he couldn’t say if he was hallucinating, still dreaming, or his eyes were playing tricks, but he swore he saw an ink-black cloud of mist flowing over his blankets, across the floor, up the wall and out through the window.

The open window.

Which had been closed against the chilly autumn nights for the last few weeks at least. Outside he could hear rain lashing the pavement and a moaning wind in the trees.

He sprang from his bed, slammed the window shut and bolted it tight. He stood there for long minutes until his breath and heart had calmed their frantic racing.

That explained the nightmare at least.

Castiel drew in a deep breath and crawled slowly back into his bed, his bones aching from their brush with icy shivers.

Either that or he really was going mad.

Sleep was not so easy to find again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise! You get a chapter a couple days earlier than I originally intended because I am impatient. Enjoy!
> 
> Thank you for everyone who has commented so far, it means a lot. :3 <3

Ch 2

October 28th

Castiel was up and out of bed as soon as the sky started to bleed gray-white into the city. Lying there chewing on his overactive imagination was not helping anything. He grabbed an apple -- one of the Braeburns -- and a protein bar, put on his track pants and running shoes. Earbuds -- some Earth, Wind, and Fire this morning -- and he jogged off into the sunrise.

In the clear light of dawn, Castiel’s troubles from the day before seemed distant and absurd. He’d been working too hard. Of course his brain was getting worked up, especially given the sorts of things he’d been writing about. But that was over now. Behind him. He was going to focus, knuckle down and crank out a Julie Chase novel if it killed him. Then he could back to his genre fiction. Maybe Julie Chase was exactly what he needed to get past this blockage. Maybe he could even re-invent Sam and Dean, in a story with a magical journal that brought its contents to life....

Yes. That was the proper realm for thoughts like this: in stories, firmly under his control.

Just as he had made some small measure of peace, something caught his eye that made him stop his jogging as suddenly as if he’d run into a post, stumbling a step or two with aborted momentum. No. That couldn’t be right. He walked backwards a few paces. Blinked hard, squeezed his eyes shut and whispered to himself, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

When he opened his eyes, he was still, impossibly, face to face with the Roadhouse.

Nestled between a minuscule Asian market and an old house that had been converted into an insurance office sat a wood-shingled run-down shack of a bar. Surely that had been an empty lot the last time his run had taken him down this street. Now -- Castiel scrubbed his fingers and thumb over his eyes, wiped the sweat from around his nose, then took another look at the thing. Yep. Still there. Plain as day, the bar where he’d been planning to have Sam and Dean get information on tracking their own personal demon.

Castiel tried to force himself to be rational, even as his heart started to race, and not from the jogging. This neighborhood was constantly changing. This -- this just had to be a coincidence. Or else he’d seen this thing go up and registered it subconsciously. Nevermind that it seemed to have sprung into being with 50 years worth of grime and road dust caked over every surface. It was just a coincidence.

Castiel lost track of how long he stood there staring open-mouthed at the Roadhouse before he felt the solid thump of somebody walking into him from behind.

“Woah!” It was a woman’s voice, low and tough. “Sorry -- didn’t see you there.” The woman grinned at Castiel, tossing dark hair over her shoulder and hoisting a shopping bag full of pretzels, nuts, and other sundries against her hip. She hurried past him before Castiel could say a word, which was good, because he was utterly dumbstruck.

“Ellen?” he heard himself call out.

And the woman turned. She goddamn turned.

“Ellen Harvelle?” Shit. Shit. Shit. Castiel’s heart thumped.

Ellen just looked confused. “Yeah, that’s me. Have we met?”

Castiel swallowed hard. “Not exactly.”

Ellen pursed her lips into a pucker, eyeing him shrewdly. “Friend of a friend?”

Castiel had no answer to that. He knew what she was really asking -- was he a hunter? Had someone sent him her way for refuge or for information? -- but he was overwhelmed with trying to process the fact that he had just waltzed straight onto the set of his own aborted novel. What the fuck was he supposed to do with that?

Before he could engage him in any further conversation with one of his supporting characters, Castiel turned and bolted back in the direction of his apartment.

If all this was Chuck’s doing, Castiel was going to flat out kill him.

~*~

“Hi, Chuck, it’s Castiel again. Look -- Yeah, I just -- That journal you sent me a couple weeks ago? I’d -- I’d like to ask where you got it. It’s, um. Real nice and. I’d. Yeah. Just call me back. Please.”

He thumbed the phone off and dropped it to the table. He couldn’t sit still. His knees bounced and he’d worried most of his fingernails down to the nib. Chuck wasn’t answering. That wasn’t unusual, and he was generally loathe to even leave a voicemail for the man, but this. He was struggling to grasp just how huge this was.

So he called Gabriel, the only person he could at least count on to not laugh in his face or march him straight off to the white padded room.

“Cassie!” Gabriel crowed when he picked up the phone. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Gabriel,” Castiel sighed. “I need help.”

His youngest older brother’s voice went serious at once. “Are you calling from prison? How much is bail?”

Castiel shook his head. “No, nothing like that. I’m.” Fuck, how to explain this? “I think I’m going crazy. Either that or I’ve accidentally encountered real, actual magic and I have no idea what the fuck to do with it.” He tried to control the wild edge on his voice. He did not succeed.

Gabriel was quiet for a moment. “Tell me what’s going on.” Castiel proceeded to relay in precise, unembellished detail what had happened the previous day and that morning. When he’d finished, Gabriel was silent for a few minutes.

“You tore out all the pages?”

“Yes.” Gabriel seemed to be taking this seriously and Castiel didn’t know whether to be relieved or even more terrified.

“Hm. Ok. You said there are symbols on the journal, can you send me a picture?”

Castiel nodded, then remembered that Gabriel couldn’t see him and said “Yeah, I can do that as soon as we’re off the phone.”

“Ok. Good. Hang tight, little bro. I’m gonna do some digging. As for you, I would advise you _strongly_ not to go looking for anything else you may have conjured up. Don’t go back to the bar. And for the love of Pete, whatever you do, DO NOT write anything else in that journal.”

Castiel’s eyes rolled so hard it was nearly painful. “No shit, Sherlock,” he growled. But Gabriel had already hung up the phone.

Castiel set his phone down carefully on the table. The journal sat innocuously by the window, closed but not latched, pen akimbo beside it. Castiel took in a deep breath to fortify himself, then reached across the table and picked it up gingerly. It still looked like nothing more than a journal, now somewhat slimmer than it had been with all his pages ripped out. Trying not to think too hard about what he was doing, he snapped a few photos of the sigils to send to his brother. The inscription caught his eye again and he huffed a wry laugh. Bring new life to your writing. Yeah. Funny. Joke’s on him, apparently.

He had not had nearly enough caffeine for this.

~*~

If Castiel had expected a timely response from his brother, he should have known better. After sending the pictures he got a quick text reading _**Thx b in touch l8r**_ and then nothing.

In theory, his job was easy that day: Do nothing. Forget about it. Let the problem lie in someone else’s hands and just pretend that the world still made logical sense and obeyed the laws of physics.

In practice, he was ready to tear his hair out by lunchtime. He couldn’t concentrate on writing, either at home nor at either of his favorite coffee shops. He couldn’t focus on the book he’d been halfheartedly reading, nor on any of the stupid shows he tried to watch on Netflix. He set a new low record for Tetris. He scrubbed his kitchen and bathroom until they sparkled, vacuumed and dusted his living room, washed and dried no fewer than three loads of laundry, and still he brimmed over with a nervous, restless energy. If he had to sit here and stew in his own juices all evening he was definitely going to go crazy. If he wasn’t already.

He made it until almost 6 o’clock before he snapped. On the flimsy pretense of going for one of his walks, Castiel donned his long coat, shut the door, and locked it behind him.

~*~

It was a short walk, really, from his apartment to where the Roadhouse had sprung into being; nevertheless, Castiel almost turned back four times. His jittery terror warred with his burning curiosity. But as dusk laid its blue shadowy blanket over the streets behind the brilliance of the streetlamps, Castiel rounded the corner to find himself yet again face to face with his creation.

The Roadhouse gleamed like an unpolished gem. Warm golden light from the windows illuminated the front deck, all rough wood and scuffed tables. A large red neon sign flickered overhead, declaring “ROA HOUSF” over a drooping string of white Christmas lights. Through the half-open door Castiel could hear a low murmur of conversation, laughter, the clack of pool cues against their targets, and the twangy strains of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

And parked out front, sparkling in the warm, low light, was a black 1967 Chevy Impala.

Castiel forgot to breathe for long enough that he almost fell forward in the gravel.

It’s not too late, he told himself. You weren’t counting on this. You can still go home, take a valium, and try to sleep. Gabriel told you not to come here anyway.

He swallowed against the lump tightening in his throat. His boots crunched in the gravel as he moved toward the door.

Stepping over that threshold was downright surreal. Eerie, even. The Roadhouse was an amalgamation of dozens of dive bars Castiel had visited in his youth, either once or frequently. It echoed in his brain like deja vu that refused to fade. It sounded right. It _smelled_ right. And yet, it could not be right.

Until he stepped into that bar, Castiel had held part of his mind in iron-clad rationality. This could not be happening, that part of his brain insisted. There had to be another explanation. But now, in the glow of these lights, sliding onto this tilted barstool, Castiel felt himself surrender. His creations had come to life. That _was_ the most rational explanation. Now all that remained was to deal with the consequences.

Ellen Harvelle -- brusque, heart of gold, tough as nails Ellen -- waved to him from where she was stacking glasses in the back. While he waited, Castiel let his eyes roam over his fellow patrons in the bar. There were not many but there were enough that it took some time before he heard a voice --

“-- Listen, Sam, I’m not saying I blame you -- Just because she was a werewolf doesn’t mean she wasn’t smokin’ hot!”

It was a voice like one too many whiskeys and too many hours inhaling the dust of the open road, but with a honeyed sweetness that made Castiel’s heart skip and stutter. He knew that voice. Even if he had never heard it before in his life, there was only one person that voice could belong to.

“Dean, just -- drop it, okay? It’s over. That’s all that matters.” That would have been Sam -- his voice higher, lighter. Fresher. Sadder.

“You just gotta be careful who you let your guard down with, that’s all I’m saying.” Castiel heard the crack of a pool break and the solid thunks of three or four balls finding their pockets. “Ha ha! Stripes.”

“I thought she was cured! Okay? Jeeze. You’re the one taking a kinda creepy level of interest in whether or not I get laid, dude. I thought you’d be happy or something.”

Castiel could practically hear Sam’s eye roll, could see it clear as video in his mind’s eye. He was almost afraid to turn and have his illusion solidify before him.

“I am happy for you! It’s about time you pulled that stick out of your ass.” Another crack of the pool cue and a single thunk. “Anyway tell me again what we’re doing here?”

A heavy, long-suffering sigh, which could only have come from the younger Winchester. “Strange weather patterns -- sudden high winds, rain storms. Sightings of a strange black fog. And the EMF reader’s been going nuts since we got here.”

“Seriously? That’s it? That’s not weird, Sam, that’s Oregon in October. Your play.”

“Hey, it’s the closest thing to a demonic omen we’ve seen in weeks.” The skidding skitter of a poorly-aimed pool cue, then Sam’s bitten curse and Dean’s laughter.

“Boy you are rusty. I’m gonna take you for all you’re worth.”

That was it. Castiel had to do it. He risked a glance over his shoulder.

Acid-wash jeans. Flannel shirts. One tall and broad with longish brown hair, the other shorter but by no means short. A glimpse of a freckle-speckled nose and delicate lips --

“What can I getcha?”

Castiel’s attention was snapped away from the vision of Dean Winchester bending over a pool table by a smiling Ellen Harvelle. “Uh,” he stammered, “Scotch on the rocks.” His mouth, at least, was still on autopilot even if his brain was offline.

“Sure, what’s your preference?” Ellen was already reaching for a tumbler.

“Macallan?”

“Got a twelve year.”

“Perfect.”

Castiel could hear Dean and Sam behind him, and was eager to turn his ear back to their conversation, but Ellen --

“You were here earlier weren’t you?” she asked. “Outside. Practically ran you over with my pretzels.”

Castiel forced himself not to be a rude jerk by ignoring her too blatantly. “Yeah. Yeah, that was me,” he admitted.

She flashed him a smile, her eyes too sharp. “You were giving my bar a stare-down like you’d seen a ghost in the window,” she said.

A sudden chill fingered its way down Castiel’s spine. Shit. He hadn’t even stopped to consider what else might have come out of that journal. But between Sam and Dean talking about black fog and strange winds and Ellen’s not-so-offhand comment about ghosts... the world he had created wasn’t all pretty boys and quaint local establishments. If Sam and Dean had come to life, what about the terrors he had invented for them to fight?

He forced down the sudden roll of nausea with a swallow of whiskey. “What can you tell me about those two behind me?” he asked with a tilt of his head, trying to sound like it was nothing more than idle curiosity.

Ellen peered over his shoulder. “Who, Sam and Dean? The two lumberjacks?” She smiled and shook her head a little. “You’re barkin up the wrong tree with either of ‘em, I’m afraid.”

Well. If that wasn’t... uncomfortably astute. “Who says I’m barking?”

“I saw you lookin,” Ellen said with a cock of an eyebrow. “You be careful with them. They’re close enough to bein’ my boys so you just watch out. I got a shotgun and I know how to use it.” With a wag of one finger -- Castiel could not tell if she was being serious or not -- she was off down to the other end of the bar to cater to some less challenging clientele.

Castiel sighed and took another swallow of his scotch. The conversation behind him had ceased, and when he turned he saw the pool balls sunk and the cues racked. Dammit. He knew it was probably for the best, but a bigger part of him was disappointed.

If his suspicions were correct, he could have done worse things right now than make contact with the Brothers Winchester. 

Leaving his whiskey half-finished -- he didn’t really need the intoxication right now -- Castiel tossed a tenner on the bar and stepped back out into the night, hands sunk in his trench coat pockets. Sure enough, the Impala was gone, just empty tire tracks where she had stood. Castiel stared at the empty parking spot for a few moments, then huffed a breath that plumed white in front of his face. He shivered, tucked his coat closer around his shoulders, and started walking toward home.

He made it all of a block before he was shivering. Damn October -- deceptively warm in the day, positively frigid after dark. Bone-chilling, in fact. Castiel had to stop and double over when he felt an icy hand grip his chest like his rib cage had frozen solid. _Fuck --_

Then he felt it. The prickle on the back of his neck.

Someone -- or something -- was watching.

Castiel felt his breath clutch in his lungs and his heart banging away at his ribs. Slowly through the tendrils of white escaping his nostrils, he turned and looked toward the deep shadows under the shopfront awnings, beyond the reach of the streetlamp’s glow. He heard nothing -- but thought he saw a shift, a piece of the shadow moving under its own willpower.

Panic shocked across his shoulders and he bolted forward a dozen steps -- then turned, still poised to flee if necessary, and looked back.

Nothing. Just a pool of light under the streetlamp and a quiet, shadowed shop front, a poster taped haphazardly to the window fluttering in the breeze.

Castiel huffed a sigh. Paranoia. Had to be. And who could blame him? He turned to continue his walk at a more sedate pace and --

The shadow was right in front of him.

Inky black, sinuous, rearing up as tall as Castiel -- taller, looming over him, like a cobra ready to strike. He let out a yelp, turned to run --

"EAT SALT, BITCH!" BANG.

From the far side of the street, the tattoo of a shotgun shot, and the lamplight restored itself for a moment. Castiel turned -- the shadow had dispersed but was rapidly re-coalescing, sliding and shifting in the direction of the gunshot.

He saw Dean with a sawed off shotgun trained on the shadow, moving in a sideways scuttle toward Castiel. “You alright?” he asked, not taking his eyes off the -- whatever it was.

“No I am not alright!” Castiel heard himself shout. “That thing --!”

Dean glanced at Castiel for just half a second. “Don’t worry about the thing. We can handle it.” He seemed remarkably calm considering that there was a nameless shadow advancing on their position. It was certainly near enough to shoot. Why wasn’t he firing??

From behind the creature, Sam came pelting out of the night, swinging a long iron poker through the mass of the creature. It swished through like it was nothing, but the shadow dispersed again with a _whoosh_ , like it had been cleaved in two -- and then assembled again, faster this time.

Dean was shoulder to shoulder with Castiel now, pushing forward to put himself between Castiel and the shadow. He glanced over his shoulder again, his gaze lingering just a moment longer. “Well,” he said, “We can probably handle it.”

The thing was advancing -- expanding, looming over them as if to cover all three with its bulk, like a tidal wave hanging suspended before falling. “Run!” Sam barked. Dean turned, shoulder-checked Castiel out of his shock -- one hand palm-flat on his chest before turning him and pushing him into a stumbling stagger -- they ran up the street with the shadow slithering from darkness to darkness at their heels, soundlessly encroaching until --

“Down!” Dean shouted and Castiel felt a hand grip the back of his coat before his knees hit the pavement, hard. The thing was on their tail -- crashed over them like a wave of icy water -- and then all was silent.

Sam shifted first. “Huh,” he huffed.

Castiel heard both brothers get to their feet, but stayed still and taut as a bowstring, his heart beating wildly in the cage of his chest.

“Well whaddya know,” Dean said. Castiel finally pried one eye open --and found that they had landed on the steps of a huge old church, one of the oldest standing buildings in the city. He stared up at the spires, all lit up blue and white and vibrant, the rosary window a glowing garden of color. It had been a long time since Castiel had practiced any kind of religion -- but in that moment, it was all he could do not to send up a prayer of thanks.

“Y’know what? I’ll take it,” Dean was saying. “You okay buddy?”

Castiel startled at the clap of a hand on his shoulder. Suddenly he found himself staring directly into the hazel-green eyes of one Dean Winchester, uncomfortably close as Dean offered his hand and a half-cocked grin.

God. Even under less-than-ideal circumstances, this man was even prettier than Castiel had pictured. His face was lit with the blue-white glow from the church, catching his eyes and glinting off the necklace he always wore -- that stupid fucking necklace Castiel had seen for a dime a dozen at a convenience store a few days ago and written onto Dean on a whim. He let himself be momentarily entranced by the warmth of his hand and the curve of his bee-sting lips before he shook his head and got himself together. “Uh. Yes. I’m fine,” he said, then backtracked. “No, actually, I am very much not fine.” His knees and hands were shaking -- he might have been bleeding under his trousers where he’d hit the concrete church steps -- and his stomach rolled dangerously as soon as he was upright. He lurched -- and was again steadied by strong hands on his arm and shoulder.

“Woah woah, easy, easy. Hey -- let me take you home, alright?” Dean murmured low and easy next to him. “Sam?”

“On it.” With that the other brother was off, pounding down the street.

Castiel fought to control the queasiness in his stomach, hands on his knees and eyes tight shut. A gentle shake from the hand on his shoulder brought him back. “Hey,” came Dean’s low voice. Castiel raised his eyes to see Dean crouched in front of him, all kind-faced and open-eyed. “What’s your name?”

“Castiel,” he said. Dean smiled and held out a hand, this time to shake. Castiel debated his balance for a moment, then decided it was worth the risk. Dean shook his hand and didn’t let go.

“I’m Dean,” he said. “Can you walk?”

Castiel took a moment to take stock of his body’s responses, then pushed off his knee with a steadying grip on Dean’s hand. The wobble of adrenaline was still definitely present, but -- “I think so,” he said.

“Great,” Dean grinned, and kept a hand on Castiel’s shoulder anyway. If he hadn’t felt as shaken as he obviously looked, Castiel might have felt patronized; as it was he was grateful for Dean’s calm presence at his side. “Where can I take you?” he asked.

“M-My apartment’s not far,” Castiel said, trying not to get any ideas. Dean walked him slowly to where the Impala was parked half in-half out of somebody’s driveway, tail halfway into the street. Before he knew it, he had pulled the door open and Castiel was being lowered into the passenger seat.

“If you need to hurl, just do it out the window,” Dean said, pointedly rolling it down. Castiel couldn’t help a chuckle at that, even if it was a weak one. He must have still looked awful. But the way Dean grinned at him as he closed the car door suggested that that -- making Castiel smile -- might have been part of his intent.

For the few seconds it took Dean to walk around to the driver’s side, Castiel let himself sink into the cozy depths of the Impala’s front seat. He was starting to adapt to this hugely bizarre idea that the things he’d written about were manifesting in flesh and blood, leather and steel. He ran his fingers over a seam in the upholstery. He knew this car -- knew what it was to the boys. Knew about the army man in the ash tray and the initials under the foot well. Knew about Dean rebuilding her from scrap after their father’s death. He’d put those marks there as much as Sam and Dean had. Or more? Hoo boy. _That_ was a philosophical quagmire that he did _not_ have the mental energy for right now. Either way, the fact that the seat cradled him like his own bed was... inescapably comforting. If he closed his eyes, he could pretend that he belonged here.

The car door creaked open and Castiel tensed up again, knocked out of his reverie by the very tangible reminder that this was _weird_. Dean Winchester was driving him home, and it was so horrifically narcissistic to develop a crush on one of your own fictional characters, but here he fucking was, sharing the quiet intimate space of a car’s front seat with a man he had literally created as his own private wish fulfillment. Castiel took a deep breath and tried to focus on something else, but Dean’s presence was inescapable. From his low voice humming along to the quiet strains of When the Levee Breaks to the glimpses of his profile Castiel kept catching out of the corner of his eye.

He closed his eyes and tried to focus on breathing. The Impala smelled like old exhaust fumes, various oils, corn nuts and jerky, the unmistakable odor of two men in close quarters and semi-irregular showers. It wasn’t exactly pleasant, but something about it put Castiel at ease. 

“So Cas -- Can I call you Cas?”

Castiel blinked at Dean, taken aback. No one had ever called him Cas. “Uh -- Sure,” he said.

Dean was clearly aiming for nonchalant, gliding his hands easy over the Impala’s steering wheel. “Lemme ask you a question,” he said. “Have you been noticing anything strange lately? Any, I dunno, weird smells? Cold snaps? Anything out of the ordinary?”

Castiel nearly burst out laughing. Understatement of the century. “You mean besides being attacked by an ambulatory shadow?” he asked.

Dean gave a short huff that was more showing teeth than laughter, but Castiel’s heart still tripped over the dimple that creased his cheek, the moment of eye contact when he glanced his way. “Humor me,” he said.

It was right on the tip of his tongue, between his teeth -- the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But he stopped. Dean. This car. Sam. Suddenly it was all _too real_. It was one thing to say it to his half-mad-himself brother or in the privacy of his own mind; it was entirely another to suddenly declare himself the creator of a man he had just met. This had to be a coincidence, or a psychotic breakdown, or _something_ but surely it was not his fictional characters coming to life. And even if it were -- how do you find the words for something like that? Even more pathetic, he found himself wanting to impress Dean, and this was definitely not the way to do it.

“No,” he said quietly. “There’s nothing.”

Dean glanced over at him and back to the road a few times. Out of the corner of his eye Castiel watched the shrewd expression of Dean’s mind at work, trying to gauge if he was telling the truth or hedging. Castiel closed his eyes and let himself sink deeper into his exhaustion, hoping that it would deter Dean’s natural inquisitiveness.

It must have worked, because the next words out of Dean’s mouth were: “You were at the Roadhouse weren’t you?”

Castiel’s eyes popped open. “Uh. Yes.”

Dean was smiling again, just a little quirk at the corner of his lips. “I thought so. I saw you there.” Dean swallowed, a shy little hesitation, then said, “What’s a nice-looking guy like you doing in a dive like that, hm?”

Nice-looking?? Castiel felt his mouth drop open. “I -- Uh. Just. Um.” Even if he had been in the Roadhouse for totally innocuous purposes, hearing something so much like a pick-up line from one of the most gorgeous men Castiel had ever met would have had him flummoxed.

Dean rescued him from his fish-mouthing with a more genuine laugh and a friendly pat to his shoulder. “Relax,” he said, “I’m just teasing you.” He turned a more serious eye on him then. “You just don’t seem the type for the Roadhouse, you know?”

Castiel blinked again, still not sure what to make of that. “And exactly what sort of type do you think I am?” he asked.

“I dunno,” Dean grinned. “More like.... wine hour at the library, I guess.”

And if that didn’t make Castiel want to melt through the seat. Library. Great. Just what every guy wanted to hear.

“Hey, I didn’t mean that as a bad thing,” Dean was quick to reassure him, his hand lingering now on Castiel’s shoulder. He allowed himself exactly 30 seconds of being captivated by the sweetness of his grin and the warmth of his hand before forcing himself to get a fucking grip already.

“Do you, uh -- Do you come to the Roadhouse often?” Shit. Now who was the one with the pick-up lines?

Dean was still grinning through when he said “Whenever we’re in the area. Ellen’s an old friend.”

Castiel nodded. “She said as much.”

“Really? You were talking about me?”

Castiel shrugged, non-committal. “I, uh. Might have asked about you.” Dangerous territory, but he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

“Oh did you now?” And fuck if that voice hadn’t just dropped an octave into a definite, unmistakable Sex Register. Castiel felt his stomach flip over, hot. “Did she threaten you with the shotgun?”

“... It might have come up,” Castiel said with a smirk.

Dean had turned all the way toward him, one hand along the back of the Impala’s bench seat, fingers sliding suggestively along the leather upholstery. “Well don’t worry. Ellen may have a shotgun, but I’ve got a rifle. Several, actually.”

“Is that supposed to turn me on?”

FUCK. The words had dropped out before he could stop them. Red alert, red alert, where the FUCK did that come from Novak. Back off. This situation is complicated enough as it is. Back. The. Fuck. Off.

But Dean was just grinning at him more wolfishly than ever. “Depends. Is it working?”

Far better than it had any right to, if Castiel was being honest, but he was not about to say that. He blinked the stardust from his eyes, bit his lip -- and only then realized that they were no longer moving. That they had been stationary for some time, in fact. The song had moved on to Kashmir and there was a gentle hiss of rain on the roof that had not been present when he got in the car. He looked out the window on his side and finally recognized the front steps of his own apartment building.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, I wondered when you were gonna catch on,” Dean teased, but warmly. Castiel turned back to take one last look at his small, slightly smug smirk. At the gleam of his eyes. The smattering of his freckles. The breadth of his chest and shoulders filling out his father’s leather jacket. The way his torn jeans pulled tight around his hips. The relaxed curl of his hands, square and work-rough.

What the fuck, Novak, stop staring and just get out of the damn car already.

“Well, then. I, uh. Guess I’d better --” he fumbled with the door handle.

“Hey, listen, uh --” Dean stopped him before he could get the door open. He was scribbling something on the back of a hastily-grabbed piece of paper. “If you, uh, think of anything, y’know. Or if anything else happens. Give me a call, okay?”

Castiel took the paper, the tips of two of his fingers just barely brushing the tips of Dean’s. He felt that touch linger, tingling on his skin. He slipped the paper into his pocket and nodded. “I will,” he said. “Thank you, Dean. For the ride, and for -- you know. Saving my life.”

Dean tossed him a grin, a thousand megawatt jolt straight to Castiel’s heart. “All in a day’s work,” he said as he shifted the car into gear. “See you around Cas.”

And that was Castiel’s cue. He pushed the door open and stepped out. “Goodbye Dean.”

Dean lifted a hand to him before checking his lane and pulling off the curb. Castiel forced himself to turn and go up the steps and not stand there _in the fucking rain_ to watch Dean’s taillights disappear around the corner. He did, however, grip tightly to the little slip of paper in his pocket that held Dean Winchester’s impossible phone number.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHEW. Not technically late because it's still Friday here for another three minutes.
> 
> This chapter brought to you by the dregs of a good scotch and a surprise 3-day weekend. It was a bit of a beast. Exposition, ho!

October 29th

_**Hi Dean. This is Castiel, from** _

Delete delete delete.

_**Hello Dean. I don’t know if you remember, but** _

Delete delete.

**_Dean! Hi! It’s Castiel! How_ **

Delete delete delete delete.

Sigh.

_**Dean -- This is Castiel. I thought you should have my number too. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help or if you figure out what that thing was.** _

Before he could over-analyze _again_ , Castiel hit send and dropped his phone on the sofa cushion. It sat there mute, as he’d known it would, and he sat next to it for a few long minutes, definitely not waiting for it to light up with a response text. Of course not. He was not some teenager with a crush. He was a grown man. Just to prove how very Not Waiting he was, Castiel stood and deliberately walked away.

He was halfway to the kitchen when his ringtone sounded and he nearly dove over the back of the sofa to snatch it up. He held his breath for a heartbeat -- can’t answer that fast, can’t sound too eager, just calm down Novak.... Ok now. He thumbed the button.

“Hello?” No he was not deliberately deepening his voice. He was not. He also wasn’t widening his stance or puffing out his chest even though he was alone in his apartment. Castiel refused to believe that he would ever do something so ridiculous --

“Morning Cassie! How’s the weather up there?”

Castiel deflated. “Hello Gabriel.”

“Jeeze, what’s with the sour grapes?”

“It’s nothing. Did you find anything?”

“What, no foreplay? Just gonna go in dry like that? What ever happened to the romance?”

Castiel rolled his eyes skyward as he wandered into the kitchen. “Ok, first of all, you’re my brother, don’t be disgusting. Second, you called me. I assume you had a reason other than making jibes?”

“Okay, okay. Sheesh. Who pissed in your cornflakes?” Gabriel sighed into the phone. “Yeah, I found something. Not sure you’ll like it, but --”

“Tell me.”

“Those symbols on your journal? They’re Enochian.”

“Gesundheit?”

“It’s the language of the angels, dick-weasel. Supposedly the very same language as the word of God when he spoke creation.”

Castiel sighed with a pinch to the bridge of his nose. “Look, if you’re just going to spout mythology at me, I’m not above asking Wikipedia --”

“It’s not just a myth. Do you want my help or not?”

Castiel shrugged, helpless. “I need all the help I can get.”

“Good. Alright. You’ve still got the journal, right?”

“Yes. And no, I haven’t written anything else.”

“And you haven’t gone looking for any more of your anomalies?”

Castiel knew that his silence spoke volumes but he couldn’t come up with a convincing “no” fast enough.

“God dammit Cassie, what did I tell you?”

“Well I’m sorry I wasn’t willing to sit around with my thumb up my ass all day!” Castiel snapped. “Wouldn’t you be curious?”

“Son of a --” With that, the line went dead.

Castiel stared at his phone with a puzzled pinch on his brow. What the hell was that all about? What harm could it actually have done to go snooping around at his own manifested creations?

On second thought, that was a supremely stupid question.

Castiel sighed and leaned against the kitchen counter. Another bright and beautiful morning with crisp, crystal-blue skies and brisk winds, and Castiel was still no closer to the truth of what was going on here. Nor was he any closer to having something of value written for Chuck. The things that had so concerned him a few days ago -- deadlines, Julie Chase, his writer’s block -- felt like the worries of another lifetime. How could he be concerned about his frustration with mere words when his creations were _literally_ manifesting around him? Maybe this was all some elaborate and vivid escapist fantasy....

His phone vibrated in his hand, and this time he looked at the display before answering. Gabriel again. He was speaking almost before Castiel got the phone back to his ear.

“Look, if you want my help, I’ll help you. But you have to do what I say, alright?”

“Why?” Castiel asked, sudden curiosity niggling at him. “What the hell do you know about this sort of thing?”

“You’re the one who called me about it, bucko.”

“A decision I’m starting to regret,” Castiel muttered. Gabriel seemed to ignore that.

“Anyway, since you decided to be an idiot and go snooping around -- what did you find?”

Castiel crossed his arm over his chest and shrugged. “Nothing, really. The bar I told you about. ... I, um. Met two of my main characters.” 

“No kidding? Were they cute?”

Castiel rolled his eyes. “Come on, Gabriel.”

“I’ll take that as a yes! Oh -- Oh Cassie, you’re not sweet on one of them are you?”

“I -- fail to see how that’s relevant.”

Gabriel crowed with laughter, loud enough that Castiel had to pull his phone away from his ear with a wince. “Oh my god! Cassie! Oh my god, you DORK. You sure you want me to solve this journal puzzle for you? Or do you just want your Prince Charming to carry you away on his big white horse?”

An image flashed in Castiel’s mind of Dean “carrying him away” in the Impala, which was neither white nor a horse but would still suit the purposes -- but he brushed it aside. “What do you mean ‘solve this journal puzzle’?”

“Well you wanted me to figure out how to reverse it, right? You want things to go back to normal?”

Now that he was asked, Castiel wasn’t really sure what he wanted to happen. At first he’d just been confused, and there was still a healthy dose of that. And yes, he had manifested these people. But now, having met them, spoken with them... “Wouldn’t that be a little like killing them?”

“Hey, I’m not here to discuss ethical quandaries with you, okay? I’m just tech support.”

Castiel chewed on his lip for a moment. “There’s something else,” he said. “I think I may have.... created something worse than just a bar and a few characters.” Standing here in his brightly-lit kitchen it seemed doubly absurd, but the fact remained. “I may have manifested a monster.”

“What kind of monster?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I included a lot of different ideas -- ghosts, demons, witches, ghouls. But the thing I saw -- it wasn’t any of those things.”

“Come on, Cassie, you gotta give me more to work with.”

“It was just -- a shadow,” he said. “A shadow that --” He swallowed. Even here, now, with the blue sky and sunshine outside his window streaming into the kitchen, a cold finger of fear slid down his throat when he thought about the shadow. But for all its tangible malice, it hadn’t actually done much of anything. Just chased them. He shook his head with a sigh. “It chased us. And Sam and Dean seemed to think it was a threat.”

“Sam and Dean, eh?” Gabriel sounded unimpressed. “These your sexy supernatural soldier boys?”

Castiel narrowed his eyes. “Shut up.”

“Look, Cassie. You might not want to hear it, but if you manifested something that might be dangerous, then I don’t think you can get away with leaving Pandora out of the box.”

Castiel squeezed his eyes shut. “It wasn’t -- Pandora wasn’t _in_ the box --”

“Does it matter? My point is that no matter how cute their asses, your darlings might have to die to save lives. Okay? It’s like our mama always used to say. You brought them into this world. You can take them out again.”

“I’m not even sure that whatever I brought out _is_ dangerous,” Castiel protested -- then the beep of another incoming call chimed in his ear. His heart leapt in his chest and he had to force down his disappointment when he saw Hannah’s name on the display. “Listen, Gabriel, I’ll call you back. Hannah’s calling.”

“Alright alright. Don’t thank me or anything.”

Castiel switched over the call before Gabriel could say anything else. “Hi, Hannah,” he said, forcing false brightness into his voice.

The first thing he heard was an intake of breath that sounded like a stifled sob. “Castiel?” Hannah’s voice sounded watery, strained, nearly broken. “Can you -- Can you come to the hospice, please?”

A completely different kind of panic sank through Castiel, sending his stomach to his shoes. “Of course -- what’s wrong?”

“It’s Grandma Louise.” She broke off with a sob that told him everything.

~*~

Hannah wasted no time flinging herself into Castiel’s arms as soon as he stepped into Louise’s apartment. She didn’t seem to be currently crying as she clung to his neck, but when she stepped back it was clear that this was a calm between the storms. She gave him a faltering smile. “Thank you for coming,” she said.

“Of course,” Castiel said, staying close as she led him into the hall and then the living room. Louise’s favorite chair sat empty except for her blue-and-white afghan, still crinkled on the arm, ready to be tossed over her lap at a moment’s notice. Castiel pressed his lips together and blinked his gaze away. His puzzle still sat on the coffee table.

This was going to be harder than he thought.

“I’m supposed to be going through her things,” Hannah was saying. “The hospice will be wanting her room back by the end of the week.” She sat down heavy on the sofa, and when Castiel looked around it was clear that nothing of the sort had been accomplished.

“Do you want help?” he asked, taking the seat next to her on the sofa.

Hannah shook her head. “Not right now. I just couldn’t be alone.”

Castiel nodded. “I’m so sorry, Hannah,” he said. It sounded empty and useless, but it was all he had to offer.

She nodded, and her face crumpled like the afghan under the threat of tears. She gasped them back and bravely swiped at the moisture gathering in her eyes. For a few moments they just sat there in an apartment that felt too empty for a room with two people in it.

“How did it happen?” he asked at last.

A sharp anger that Castiel had not expected flashed in Hannah’s eyes. “That’s the worst part. Those -- those _soup nazis _weren’t doing their damned jobs!” she almost shouted.__

__“They weren’t -- what?”_ _

__“She was attacked!” Hannah screeched, two fat tears falling. She didn’t wipe them away this time; she got to her feet and started pacing the floor with quick strides. “My grandmother -- attacked in her own home in what’s _supposed_ to be a secure facility! If we had known what kind of security this place had -- that they would just let anybody waltz in here -- I swear to the All Mighty, Grandma would never have set foot in here! And the police -- they don’t want to do anything about it! They think just because she was an old woman that she --”_ _

__Castiel cut through his shock and Hannah’s tirade to ask “Attacked, how?”_ _

__“With a knife!” Hannah gasped. “Some -- some psychopath drew a knife on her! Gave her a heart attack -- and then -- he just kept --” she gestured with slashing motions up and down her face and it was not necessary for her to continue, which was good, because she was quickly losing the ability. She folded in on herself with sobs and Castiel stood again to draw her into his embrace._ _

__They stood there for a long time, Hannah clinging to the lapels of his trenchcoat in an iron grip, wailing sobs against his chest as he whispered soothing nothings into her hair and rocked gently back and forth. Slowly, slowly, she quieted, but made no move to draw back, so he just kept holding her for as long as she needed._ _

__The quiet was broken by a sharp knock at the door._ _

__Hannah pulled back, her face red and her eyes bloodshot. “I -- can you?” she asked, making her way back over to the sofa and the box of tissues. Castiel nodded and went to the door._ _

__When he pulled it open, it was to see two familiar and very unexpected faces._ _

__Sam and Dean were wearing well-pressed suits and frozen expressions of surprise. For a few seconds, all three of them just gaped at each other._ _

__Dean recovered first. “Cas! Hey -- fancy seeing you here,” he laughed with nervous, wrong-footed cheer._ _

__Castiel stepped into the hall and shut the door behind him. “What are you doing here?” he asked in a low growl._ _

__It was Sam who answered. “We’re investigators with the Portland Police bureau,” he said, and the lie slipped out easily. “We’re here to discuss what happened last night. Did you know the deceased?”_ _

__Castiel’s heart raced, his brain full of hissing static. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes I did.”_ _

__“Were you related?” Sam asked._ _

__“No, that would be Hannah.” Castiel crossed his arms over his chest. “But I think she’s already spoken to the police.”_ _

__“We’re specialists,” Sam said with a brief grin, “conducting a follow-up interview.”_ _

__God, had he really written him to be such a smooth liar? It was almost creepy._ _

__“Don’t worry, it’s strictly routine,” Dean interjected. Castiel shifted his gaze to the elder Winchester, eyes still narrowed. “Tell you what,” he said, reaching out to take gentle hold of Castiel’s elbow. “Why don’t you and I take a walk and we’ll let Sam have a word with Hannah, okay?”_ _

__Castiel could feel Dean’s tug on his arm but he didn’t follow it yet. Instead he broadened his stance across the doorway. Sam might tower a good six inches over him, but that didn’t mean Castiel would be a pushover. “If you upset her again, I swear to God --” he trailed off with a tight-mouthed glare. Sam gave him a smile that was at least intended to be reassuring._ _

__“Don’t worry, Cas,” Dean said, pulling more firmly at Castiel’s arm. Cas relented and let Sam step around him and into the apartment as Dean led Castiel down the hall and out the front doors of the facility._ _

__“I’m serious. If I get back in there and Hannah is --”_ _

__“Relax, Cas,” Dean says, his hands nonchalantly tucked into his pockets as they strolled along. “This ain’t Sam’s first rodeo; your girlfriend’s in good hands.”_ _

__“She’s not my girlfriend,” Castiel heard himself say._ _

__Dean did a double-take. “Huh?”_ _

__“Hannah. She’s not -- uh. Not really my type,” he said with a lift at the corner of his mouth. He knew it was foolish, but he hoped all the same that Dean would pick up on what he was getting at. Even though he knew just how forlorn and fruitless his attraction was. Dean was _straight._ No matter how nicely he smiled or how flirty he had seemed the night before. It couldn’t be what it seemed because he had specifically, intentionally, written Dean as heterosexual. This was just like the apples. He’d been thinking Honeycrisps. So it didn’t matter that he now wanted Braeburns. Dean was a Honeycrisp, plain and simple._ _

__And now he would have to hang up his writer’s shingle because that was the worst analogy he’d ever come up with._ _

__He caught Dean giving him a strange look just before Dean looked away with a clearing of his throat and -- was that a blush on his cheekbones? Must have been a trick of the light. “Listen,” Dean said, “I’m gonna be straight with you.” Ha ha. Very funny Mister Winchester. “We think that whatever killed Mrs Hartsmith is the same thing that attacked you last night._ _

__Castiel’s stomach clenched around the cold blooming there. “I was afraid you’d say that,” he said with a wince._ _

__“I also think --” Dean stopped him with a two-fingered touch to his elbow, turning him so they stood face to face. “I also think you know more about this than you’re letting on. Now, this thing, whatever it is? It’s probably just getting started.” Dean looked at him like a pleading puppy, and that just wasn’t fair. “We need all the help we can get, Cas.”_ _

__They stood like that for a long moment, Dean with his huge earnest eyes and Castiel fighting with himself. Gabriel’s words echoed in his ears: _Your darlings might have to die to save lives._ If this -- whatever it was -- had indeed attacked Louise, then it was his fault. He owed it to her -- he owed it to Hannah -- to see this thing banished back to the ether before it could do any more damage._ _

__He just hoped he could do that without having to sacrifice the life of the man in front of him. And preferably also without letting him know just how far his responsibility extended._ _

__“Why do you call me that?” Castiel found himself asking._ _

__Dean blinked, wrong-footed again. “Uh -- I’m not sure. It’s just, y’know, ‘Castiel’ is a bit of a mouthful,” he said with a lopsided grin._ _

__“Well that’s been said before.” Curse his mouth; the joke slipped out before Castiel could think better of it and he immediately wanted to bit off his own tongue for betraying him -- again. Dean’s eyes bugged out and this time there was a definite flush creeping up his neck, but then he was laughing in earnest, brief but bright. Cas couldn’t help grinning back._ _

__“I, uh,” he said. “I can stop if you want.”_ _

__Castiel shook his head. “No -- I like it. It’s just that no one’s ever called me that before.”_ _

__Dean’s chin jerked in surprise. “Seriously? It’s like the most obvious nickname ever.”_ _

__Castiel just shrugged. “Well.” He took a deep breath and prepared himself for the plunge. “You’re not wrong,” he said. “I -- I think I can provide some insight. I don’t know what the thing is or how to stop it. But... I do know where it came from.”_ _

__Then Dean was looking at him like the sun had just come out, a broad toothy grin on his face. “That’s -- that’s great, Cas. I’m all ears.”_ _

__Cas just sighed. “It would be easier if I showed you.”_ _

__~*~_ _

__Of all the surreal weirdness that Castiel had been encountering lately, seeing a man he had dreamed up sitting in the chair where he had been invented was the the most cerebrally dissonant. Dean was slumped into a chair in Cas’s writing nook, turning the journal over and over in his hands without opening it. Sam was pacing between the sofa and the kitchen island, hands on his hips. Both of them had removed their jackets and ties, unbuttoned their collars, and rolled up their sleeves. Castiel was trying not to stare at Dean’s exposed forearms -- _forearms,_ get a grip, Novak -- but the gravity of the situation helped keep his mind out of the gutter._ _

__“So this is it?” Dean asked. “Enchanted journal?”_ _

__Castiel nodded._ _

__Sam’s expressive brow crinkled with a raised an eyebrow at Castiel. “And you invented this thing -- why?”_ _

__“I thought it would make a good story,” he said with a shrug. “At first, anyway. I got fed up with it and tore out the pages before I got very far.”_ _

__“Maybe that’s it,” Dean said, spreading both hands and dropping the journal on the table. “Maybe you need to finish the story.”_ _

__Castiel frowned. “I -- no, I don’t think so.” _Don’t write anything else in the journal,_ Gabriel had said, and if nothing else Gabriel had the advantage that he hadn’t been born out of that same magic only yesterday._ _

__“Why not?” Dean asked._ _

__Castiel opened the journal and showed Dean the ragged remnants of the torn out pages. “This -- magic, or whatever it is -- it only seems to work when I tear out the pages. If I start writing again now, I might just create an entirely new monster.”_ _

__Dean swiped a hand over his mouth and jaw, thinking. “Do you still have the pages?” he asked._ _

__“I -- uh. Maybe?” That was a lie. He knew exactly where the pages were. Their location in the recycling bin burned in Castiel’s brain, but he could not let Sam and Dean see those pages. “I have this though --” he snatched up the crumpled shopping list from his table, smoothed it flat, and handed it to Dean._ _

__He saw the moment Dean’s eyes lingered on the word “lube.” His brow lifted and he flicked his eyes up at Castiel. Castiel met his gaze steadily. He flatly refused to be embarrassed in his own home for his personal habits. Still, he was glad when Dean made no comment._ _

__“All of these things were here when I got back to the store after I tore it out,” Castiel said._ _

__“Do you still have any of them?” Sam asked._ _

__Castiel nodded and went to the kitchen, grabbing a Honeycrisp apple. He tossed it to Sam. “It even seemed to know what kind of apple I wanted. These are Honeycrisps -- I bought Braeburns.”_ _

__Sam inspected the apple briefly; Dean stood up and took it out of his hand. “There are different kinds of apples?” he asked, skeptical. “And you have a preference?”_ _

__Castiel squinted at him. “Do you not?”_ _

__Dean shook his head with a chuckle. “Dude. That is so --” He stopped himself with a glance in Castiel’s direction. A lifetime of enduring that look let Castiel know that he had been about to say ‘gay’ and realized a moment too late that that might have been politically incorrect. He gave Dean his most unimpressed scowl. Dean had the decency to look a little chagrined, then shoved the apple into his mouth and took a huge bite._ _

__“Well,” he said around his juicy mouthful. “They’re real enough. Goddamn.” His eyes went wide as he chewed and swallowed. “That is good.”_ _

__Castiel smirked a little ‘I told you so’ kind of smirk._ _

__Sam just rolled his eyes and shook his head at his brother, then went back to inspecting the journal. “You said your publisher sent this to you?” he asked. Castiel nodded. “Have you talked to him about it?”_ _

__“I’ve tried to call him; he won’t answer. That’s not unusual though. If he wants to talk, he’ll call me, but he can be... difficult to get ahold of the other way around.” Not that Castiel was bitter or anything._ _

__Sam was peering at the inscription in the front of the journal when Dean tossed the apple core in the waste bin and said “Cas, get me another one of those apples, will you? Plus some salt and a pan or a bowl -- something you don’t mind getting scorched.” Dean dug in his pocket and pulled out a Zippo as Castiel raised both eyebrows and did as he was told. He watched as Dean dropped the shopping list into the pan, sprinkled it with Kosher table salt, then set fire to one corner of the list. The paper started to smolder and turn to ash, acrid paper-smoke filling the air. Dean’s movements were casual and practiced, like this was a totally normal, every-day occurrence._ _

__“You planning on making a pie or something?” Castiel asked._ _

__Dean flashed him a grin, lit by the flickering light of the burning paper. “Well -- I do love me some pie,” he said. “But no. Salting and burning is a pretty standard way of disrupting magic or spirits. But that apple still looks pretty solid to me.” He stepped closer and plucked the apple out of Castiel’s hand, then maintained eye contact as he took another large bite. “Yep. Tastes real,” he said through bulging cheeks, a twinkle in his eye._ _

__“Was that just an excuse to eat all my apples?” Castiel asked, eyebrows high. Dean kept chewing, but offered the bitten apple back to Castiel. Cas just rolled his eyes at him and said “No no, by all means.” Dean grinned and took another bite._ _

__From across the room, Sam cleared his throat pointedly. Cas turned and saw that they were being watched and had to pretend he wasn’t blushing like a fire truck. Though he didn’t know why. There hadn’t been anything untoward in that interaction -- had there been? It was only then that he realized just how close he and Dean were standing -- almost toe to toe -- and took a deliberate step backwards._ _

__“We could try burning the book,” Dean suggested. “Or destroying the symbols maybe?”_ _

__Sam shook his head. “That would be premature, I think,” he said. “It could just as easily be that the journal is the key to fixing this. What else did you write about in here?” he asked._ _

__Castiel froze. “What do you mean?” he asked._ _

__“I mean you probably didn’t write this much just about a monster, right?” He was running his thumb down the frayed paper edges close to the spine, which clearly indicated a thick sheaf. “You must have had other things -- settings maybe? Characters?”_ _

__“Uh. Yes. I suppose I did.” Castiel bit his tongue and refused to say anything else._ _

__Sam nodded. “Why don’t you two search the city, see if there’s anything else that’s manifested. Maybe we can get more clues that way.:_ _

__Dean nodded. “What about you?”_ _

__Sam was already picking up their suit jackets, tossing Dean’s to him and swinging his own around his shoulders. “I’m gonna go take another look at that police report, and then I’m taking this,” he held up the journal, “To the library and do some research on the symbols.”_ _

__Castiel was reluctant to let Sam take the journal, but he could see no better option. And he had definite mixed feelings about spending the afternoon in the car with Dean, alone with the just the weight of his unspoken confessions hanging between them. But before he could think up a reasonable protest, Dean was leading the way down the stairs with a toothy grin, tossing back over his shoulder “Come on Your Highness -- Your chariot awaits!”_ _

__Trying not to feel like he was about to charge blindfolded through a minefield, Castiel followed._ _


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise! Another chapter! I have a long weekend so I get to spoil you guys. Woohoo!
> 
> Forewarning: This chapter gets a little... gross.... xD

“Do you mind if I change first?” Dean asked, pulling a duffle bag out of the Impala’s trunk. “The monkey suit’s not so great for legwork.”

Castiel nodded and handed over his key. It didn’t take more than a few minutes for Dean to come back down the stairs, dressed again in his comfortably ripped jeans, a dark blue over-shirt, and leather jacket. Castiel’s heart skipped a few beats at his cocky grin and the casual grace with which he slid into the driver’s seat.

God, he was in deep. Deep shit, maybe.

As they drove off into the light drizzle, Castiel tried to get his heart out of his throat. Looking for more things he’d invented. That was the very last thing he should be doing right now, and with Dean Fucking Winchester no less. All the things he could say but wouldn’t kept crowding to the forefront of his mind -- the Roadhouse. This car. Your brother. _You._ Everything you know and love and stand for. Every horrible thing you’ve ever been through. Everything you hold dear and everything you hate. I am the one who put all that there. And by the way, the fact that you look like you walked straight out of one of my wet dreams? Totally just a coincidence.

This was so fucked up.

“So,” Dean said into what was probably a terribly awkward silence. “Where to, Hemingway?”

Castiel gaped, then snorted. “I write pulpy mystery and horror shlock. I appreciate the comparison, but --”

“Hey, we call that a joke, smartass.” Dean flashed him a grin. “I’m just asking where you think I should point the car?”

Castiel sighed and sank further back into the seat. “I don’t know. Um. Try north -- get on 405 and cross the bridge. There’s a particular corner I was thinking of when I was writing about a haunted house, maybe that’s there.”

Relatively innocuous, potentially dangerous, and had very little to do with anything important. It was just a plot hook. It was perfect.

Dean nodded. “Aye aye, Captain,” and made the turn onto the freeway.

They drove in silence for a while to the tune of wipers on the windshield and the hiss of tires on the wet road. Castiel stared out at the city he knew so well, its trees in bright orange autumn glory, muted by the rain. Somewhere out there was a nebulous fiend slashing people to ribbons, and it was all Castiel’s fault. He sighed deeply and let his forehead thunk against the cold, damp window.

“You okay over there?” Dean asked.

“It’s my fault,” Castiel said quietly, the window fogging with his words. “It’s my fault Louise is dead, and if anybody else gets hurt --”

“Hey, don’t beat yourself up too bad,” Dean said with the practiced ease of one who had given himself this speech more than a few times. “You can’t blame yourself for something you didn’t know. Alright? We’ll find this thing, and we’ll beat it. It’s kinda my day job.”

When Cas peeked over at Dean, the man looked perfectly relaxed, shooting him reassuring smiles with open eyes and a dimple in each cheek as he glanced back and forth between him and the road. His fingers drummed out a nonsense rhythm on the steering wheel, one hand dropping down to curl, relaxed, over his knee. Castiel’s own hand clenched around an urge to loop through those fingers, to draw that strength and reassurance directly from the source. Dean’s fingertips caught the frayed edge of the rip in his jeans, plucking at a thread, and Castiel’s mouth went dry at the glimpses of skin he caught through the rip. God. He was getting all breathless over the sight of the man’s _knee._ It had clearly been too long.

But he was beautiful, that much Castiel could not deny. What was more, Castiel felt like he could trust him. Whatever he was, wherever he’d come from -- figment, the ether, whatever -- Castiel had made sure that he was good at his job. Maybe... Maybe this would work. Maybe they could defeat the thing without Dean ever finding out the truth. And maybe...

No. No, Castiel, don’t even go there. You wrote him straight, and even if you hadn’t, do you really want to wade through that ethical quagmire? Castiel closed his eyes with a sigh and thunked his head against the window again.

Dean broke the silence again. “So you’re a writer, huh? What’s that like?”

Castiel shrugged. “Lonely, mostly. Difficult, boring, occasionally very rewarding. Lately more the former than the latter.” He had to bite down on his lips then before he started whining about his publisher, the deadlines that he was currently avoiding, every minor quibble and complaint he had that didn’t really belong in small-talk.

“How’d you get into it?” Dean asked, curious.

“I’ve just... always done it, I guess.” Castiel tried to think back to when he’d started and couldn’t quite remember. Dean stayed quiet, waiting for him to continue. “I was home-schooled growing up -- all of us were, my four older brothers and my sister.”

“Wow,” Dean said, eyebrows climbing. “Big family.”

“They’re all much older than me. My oldest niece is almost my age. I don’t think I was supposed to happen at all,” Castiel said ruefully.

“Well,” Dean said with one of those lopsided grins. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you did.”

Castiel tried, he really tried not to cling to that little life raft of sentiment. But he felt his cheeks pink up anyway.

“So anyway, you were home-schooled?” Dean prompted.

“Yes,” Castiel nodded, shifting himself so he was more upright in the seat. “With all my siblings basically grown up and gone and my parents preoccupied with their own golden years, and home-schooling mostly with tutors -- I didn’t exactly have a lot of what you might call... you know... friends.” Castiel tried not to make it sound pathetic, but that was difficult when that’s how he often felt about himself as a child. He’d been a weird, lonely child, even when his mother had started sending him to clubs that were supposed to help with socialization. Even among other weird loners, he was a weird loner. “We had a church group, but I stopped going to that when I was about twelve for what I think might be fairly obvious reasons.”

Dean just gave him a lingering look, then nodded.

“So -- anyway that’s a long-winded way to say that I grew up very lonely. So I read books. A lot of books. And it was only so long before I wanted to try my own hand at words and stories and things, one thing lead to another and -- well, here I am I guess.”

Dean was just staring at him with a little up-tilt at the corner of his mouth. Castiel stared back, wondering at first if he had food on his face or something and then just... enjoying the moment. The stillness. The close warmth of the car in the face of the chilly damp outside. The windows had fogged, and the white noise of raindrops on the roof and the purr of the engine made this little cocoon around them, a space outside the world where anything could happen. Was just about to happen. Castiel’s gut was swooping already, a shiver at the base of his spine and his heart kicking against his ribs as he stared, caught in Dean’s deep green-hazel eyes, and Dean just... stared right back. He sucked in breath and found it wouldn’t stay in his lungs, thinking of all the things he could _do_ with this gorgeous man, here in the crucible heat of the car --

A horn blared behind them, shocking them out of whatever trance they had fallen into. The light in front of them was green. Dean made a rude gesture at the back window with a shout of “HEY SAME TO YOU” even though the other driver couldn’t hear him. Then he pulled the car into the intersection with a lurch.

The spell was broken, and Castiel didn’t know whether to be relieved or frustrated. It had probably been his imagination anyway. If it had gone on much longer he probably would have done something stupid, like lean in and kiss the lips he’d created. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The rest of the drive was silent except for necessary directions. Once they were parked Castiel went for his seat belt as quick as he could, but was stopped by Dean’s fingertips on his elbow.

“Hey, listen, um,” Dean started with a swallow and a low, quiet voice. “When this is all over, do you wanna maybe, um -- get a drink? Or... something?” His eyes lifted hopefully, then darted away. This time Castiel knew he wasn’t imagining the rosy pink in his cheekbones or the nervousness in the way he pressed his lips together between his teeth.

Castiel felt like he’d been hit in the face, or maybe dunked in hot water. He laughed a little, incredulous. “I, uh. I thought you were straight,” he murmured.

Dean just shrugged. “Call me flexible,” he said with a smirk. “Or, y’know. Bisexual. If you wanna be clinical about it.”

And that... Castiel had no idea what to do with that. Confusion whirled in his brain. Maybe this wasn’t like the Honeycrisps. People were a lot more complicated than apples. But Dean was still looking at him with bitten lips and raised eyebrows, waiting on an answer, and the urge to lean in and suck those lips between his own was far too strong. So he just nodded and licked his own lips, trying not to pay attention to how Dean’s gaze dropped to follow the motion. “Yeah,” he heard himself saying. “Yeah, okay.”

Dean’s grin was like a sunrise, like a thousand-watt electrical arc. “Great,” he said just a hair too loudly. “Now let’s go hunt some monsters.”

~*~

“This the place?” Dean asked, pointing toward what had been a vacant lot on Irving street. Between two charmingly shabby duplexes there now squatted an old Craftsman-style house, its small yard hopelessly overgrown and peeling paint the color of dust. The windows were dark and un-curtained; a few drooping steps led up to a porch strewn with browned leaves. Castiel thought he saw a curtain fall in an upstairs window, but when he looked up there were no curtains to be seen. The houses on either side had a pumpkin or two on their porches and some fake nylon cobwebbing, but this house clearly had no need for such seasonal adornment, and no one in residence to appreciate them.

Castiel nodded. “That’s it.”

“Yeah, sure looks haunted.” Cas jumped a bit. Dean was standing a lot closer than he’d anticipated, right behind his shoulder, giving the house a skeptical eyebrow.

“You don’t seem convinced,” he said.

Dean shrugged. “You can’t always judge a book by its cover, you know? In my experience, the most seriously haunted houses look perfectly normal on the outside. Places like this?” He shrugged and gave a little “so so” side-to-side rock of his hand.

Castiel narrowed his eyes at Dean, squared his shoulders in defense of his craft. “Well excuse me for trying to set the tone. I’ll remember that the next time I’m going for atmosphere utilizing recognizable tropes.”

Dean held up both hands, a laughing twinkle in his eye. “Hey, I didn’t say it was wrong! Just a little, maybe, y’know...”

“What?”

Dean bit his lip, the mirth still dancing all over his face. “Cliche.”

Castiel gave the biggest, most dramatic eye-roll he could muster, muttered “Everyone’s a critic,” and stalked toward the house.

“Hey hey, woah --” Dean caught him by the arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Cas gestured to the front door, then realized belatedly how stupid that probably was.

“Yeah,” Dean said. “Come on.” He led the way around the side of the house, down the narrow alley between the exterior wall and a chainlink fence. The sweet smell of decaying wood and grass rose from their footsteps as they picked through the damp, dead vegetation.

About halfway toward the back yard, they found a short set of crumbling concrete stairs, nearly grown over with vegetation, leading down to a door into a half-submerged basement. At the bottom of the steps, a rusty padlock lay broken on the ground in front of the door. Dean picked up the lock and examined the broken bend. “Well, I was gonna say jackpot, but I’ve changed my mind,” he said, then tossed a grin over his shoulder at Castiel. “Double jackpot.”

“Dean --” Cas tried to voice his misgivings, because if that lock was broken who knew what had come through here before them -- but Dean was already pushing the door open and disappearing into the gloomy basement.

The daylight filtering through grimy windows did very little to illuminate the basement. Castiel had a vague impression of tables or work benches on either side of the door, a structural post or two ahead of them, and then nothing -- just ominous shadows stretching away on all sides. The floor was gritty concrete under his feet; he could smell mildew, animal feces (at least he hoped it was animal), damp dirt and standing water.

Before he could start groping in the cobwebs for a light-switch, he felt something poke at his arm. Dean was pressing a flashlight into his hand. Thus armed with their beams of light, the pair of them ventured forward into the basement.

They didn’t find much: a few flowerpots full of desiccated dirt, an ancient lawnmower, and a set of rickety steps up to the ground floor. At the top was a door that let out into the kitchen, bright after the darkness of the basement even though the windows were caked with dust so thick that the watery light of the rainy day barely made it through. Dean pocketed his flashlight and pulled out a clearly handmade electronic device. It whirred and blipped with a high, constant whine, the row of red lights along the top blinking wildly.

“EMF?” Castiel asked.

“Yeah, it’s all over --” Dean did a double take. “How did you know?”

Castiel gulped. “Um. Lucky guess?”

Dean raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment. “Well it’s not gonna do me much good if I can’t pinpoint it,” he said, tucking the reader back in his pocket and peering through an arched doorway into the dining room. There wasn’t a lot to see: just sheet-draped furniture scattered here and there around the rooms, making hulking shapes out of every day objects. Castiel kept his flashlight out, shone the beam into the corners, illuminated only cobwebs, and jumped when the resulting shadows moved.

He was shining his light on a dull crystal chandelier and was just drawing breath to ask Dean what, exactly, they were looking for, when they heard it -- a thump-drag, thump-drag of uneven footsteps moving through the house.

Castiel caught Dean’s arm. “You hear that?”

Dean nodded. “That ain’t no spirit,” he said.

A second set of dragging footsteps joined the first, this one from the other direction. Castiel turned, letting the beam of light sweep toward the foyer in what might have been the direction of the sound. He wound up back to back with Dean, both of them tense and ready. He took some measure of strength from the solid presence at his back.

He saw the shadow first -- a lopsided, mostly human thing, with arms swinging. Then it came into view --

“Aw, fuck me,” Dean moaned, “I hate zombies.”

First came two massive hulks in matching ragged coats, shambling toward them, then a third with the matted remnants of a blonde braid who seemed to be missing her legs -- Castiel fought down a roil of nausea -- but that wasn’t stopping her from slithering toward Castiel’s ankles.

“Dean?” Castiel asked, “What do we do?”

“Whatever we have to,” Dean growled, pulling a machete out of his coat.

The girl was the first to get close enough. Castiel swung the long heavy flashlight in an arc toward her head. It hit with a solid THUMP into soft tissue, and he grimaced -- shouldn’t there have been a skull in there? She yowled, dry and rasping, and shuffled back.

His victory was short-lived. One of the large hulks took a swing with meaty fists at Castiel’s head -- he dodged, then a split second later he saw the danger to Dean and lunged forward, straight into the thing’s putrid stomach. The hulking zombie fell to the floor, grabbing at Castiel and pulling him down on top of him.

“Cas!” Dean yelled. The legless girl was back up now and leveraging her smaller mass to her advantage -- crawling up Castiel’s body like a spider and clinging to him, pinning his arms behind his back. Castiel struggled, but her wiry strength held him in place as the hulk sat up under him and started to grope for his throat.

 _Splat!_ came sound like a water balloon popping and a cool, gelatinous splatter all over the back of his head. The arms holding him in place went rigid, then dropped.

“Oh man -- that is -- I’m sorry man,” he heard Dean groan. Castiel put two fingers into the mess. His fingers came away wet with something putrid, and Castiel retched.

Between his heaving, the body below him was shifting and tossing him off like a rag doll. “Cas, here!” Dean shouted again; Cas heard a dull clank near his elbow and reached out. It was sheer dumb luck that his fingers found the hilt of the machete and not the blade. he staggered to his feet, the machete gripped in both hands, and squared off against the big zombie -- spared a glance over at Dean who seemed to have already dispatched one and was wrestling with two more who had come out of nowhere.

WHAM -- the big zombie came in swinging. Castiel parried the broken fists with the flat side of the blade. “Who are they?” Castiel growled. “Why are they here?”

Dean was using the momentum of the two apparently-female zombies to knock their heads together. “Whoever they were --” he shouted back. “Now they’re just monsters. Go for the head!” And with that he hurled one of the zombie women straight into a sheet-covered frame against the wall. Whatever was behind the sheet shattered with a deafening crash. “Yes!” Dean yelled. With the zombies distracted he tore off a strip of sheet and used it to wrap one of the larger shards of the broken mirror and threatened the women with its razor-sharp tip.

Castiel backed slowly away from the huge hulk in front of him. It didn’t seem so huge when he looked at it -- broad-shouldered, yes, but not so enormous as he’d originally thought. And he looked like he’d been wearing a nice varsity jacket at one point. And a good haircut. This guy -- he was just a kid. Or had been.

Whoever he was or had been, one thing was certain: Castiel had not written about this.

The zombie grabbed Castiel’s head with both hands and zeroed in on his face with broken, rotted-out teeth. Castiel cringed his eyes shut and shoved the machete into the thing’s rotting guts. The stench was eye-watering, but Castiel ignored it, pulled the blade out of the suddenly-limp body, and sliced through the thing’s neck with a firm back-handed swing. It fell like a sack of beans, not even twitching.

Across the room, Dean had had some success with his makeshift mirror-knife, but one zombie was still kicking and had attached herself to his back and neck with all the strength her rigor-mortised limbs could muster. Dean was swinging wildly, but could not easily reach any part of her. Cas could see Dean’s face turning blue.

It took barely a thought. Castiel ran up to the creature and sank his blade into her side, up under her ribs. She stiffened, spasmed, and dropped her grip from around Dean’s neck and waist. Dean stumbled away, gasping, and Cas raised the blade once more to bring it down and sever the thing’s neck.

In the quiet that followed, the reality of the what had just happened started to sink in. Castiel tried to swallow a few times to avoid being sick again, but eventually he just gave in, dry-heaving in a corner. His knees and arms shook with leftover adrenaline, and even after he was done retching he couldn’t quite swallow the pit in his belly.

“Hey,” Dean asked, bending over to look him in the eye. “This doesn’t have to count as our first date,” he said. And against all odds, Castiel _laughed._

“Good.”

Dean smiled, then left him to catch his breath while he inspected the bodies. There was a lot of muttering about “sonuvabitch Sam gets to go sit in the nice clean library -- God. Gross. Ugh.” but he made damn sure that their heads were completely severed and they showed no signs of life. He even kicked the heads away into their own separate pile, just in case.

“You do this all the time?” Castiel asked when his breathing was mostly normal again.

Dean shrugged. “Zombies like this... this is a new one. Werewolves, sure. Ghouls -- yeah. But it’s not usually this gross. Although shapeshifters --” he gave a full-body shudder. “I’ll spare you the details.”

“Thanks.” Castiel heaved himself off the wall where he’d been leaning and handed the machete back to Dean.

And really, the fact that they were both covered in bits of dead and rotting flesh should have been more of a deterrent than it was when Dean flashed him a warm, grateful grin. “You did good,” Dean said. “Thanks for the backup. I know this isn’t exactly in your job description.”

Castiel spread his hands. “I can’t exactly say it was my pleasure, but you’re welcome.” Dean laughed, long and joyful, his head thrown back, and Cas found himself smiling. Any time he could induce that laughter, he would. Any time at all. He’d take zombie guts in a heartbeat to hear it again.

“C’mon,” Dean said with a hand on his shoulder -- he seemed to want to let it linger, but his fingers landing in a glob of some unidentifiable zombie goo was too much even for Dean’s iron-clad constitution. “Let’s go get cleaned up. Then we can figure out what the hell this was all about.”

Castiel could not have agreed faster.

~*~

Dean would not let either of them anywhere near the Impala’s leather interior without a rigorous toweling-off, which Castiel couldn’t exactly blame him for. He seemed, frankly, more concerned for the car than for himself; Cas couldn’t help a fond smile at his fussing. A smile which earned him a glare when Dean caught his expression, just before Dean assaulted him with the cleanest part of a ragged towel. “You too pal,” he grunted, scrubbing at the hair at the back of Castiel’s head, behind his ears. Castiel giggled -- not that he would ever admit to such a thing, and he tried to put up a fight but the truth was that he didn’t entirely mind. If you took away the smell of entrails and the chunky sliminess, this would have been a scene very much to Castiel’s liking.

Yeah, okay, there was definitely something twisted about that.

Eventually, they made it into the car -- Dean’s leather jacket and Castiel’s trenchcoat tossed in the trunk and an old wool blanket laid down across the seat -- and on the road back to Castiel’s apartment.

“Man,” Dean groused. “I hate zombies. They stink.” Even with all the windows cranked down, the pungent reek of rot was powerful. “What was up with that anyway? Who puts zombies in a haunted house?”

Castiel squinted at him. “Why are you asking me?”

“Uhhh, duh? Nutty professor? You’re the one that wrote about it?”

Castiel shook his head and looked up at a patch of blue sky and partially-revealed sun peeking through the clouds. “You were the one complaining about cliches earlier. But the truth is, I didn’t write anything about zombies.”

“You -- you what? So it could be something else entirely?”

Castiel shook his head. “That house was mine, down to the last detail. So either they’re related or it’s a massive coincidence. I just don’t know how?”

Dean shook his head. “Who knows, man? We still don’t know how that journal works. Maybe it’s not a perfect translation and your ghosts turned into zombies?”

Castiel nodded, but guilt was clenching his stomach again. “Or what if those were real people? What if some kids got into the house and became -- corrupted somehow?”

“Hey now, don’t worry about that, alright?” Dean said, trying to be reassuring but unable to refute the possibility. “Look -- let’s wait and see what Sam turned up, okay? It’s not a good idea to theorize without all the facts.”

Castiel nodded vaguely. All the facts. Right. He sighed and sank lower in the seat again, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose.

He should come clean. He knew he should. Holding back information now could only lead to more people dying because of his foolishness. The longer he put it off, the more difficult it would be, especially if he and Dean gave in to the attraction that was apparently mutual. There were myriad reasons why getting involved with Dean was a horrible idea -- but he wasn’t sure any of them would be enough to stop him. He _liked_ Dean. He liked him a lot. He was funny and dedicated and loyal and smart and easy to talk to and competent and absolutely gorgeous....

And he was Castiel’s creation. How fucking narcissistic could he get?

And if they fell into each other only for Castiel to drop that bombshell after....

Dean was watching him in quick glances as they drove. “You okay?” he asked, clearly worried. Castiel felt like throwing up, and this time not from the zombies.

“Fine,” he said. “Just tired.”

Dean nodded. “First brush with this kind of crap will do that to you,” he said. “Tell you what, we’ll get cleaned up, then I’ll go get us some pie before Sammy gets back, alright?”

His grin was so pure, so hopeful, it warmed Castiel right down to the toes. Even when he felt like walls were closing in on him from all sides, Cas couldn’t help but return it just a little.

God, he was so, _so_ screwed.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I meant to have this up yesterday, buuuuuuuut ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ real life's a bitch.
> 
> We're starting to earn our rating here, friends.... huehuehuehue
> 
> A huge thanks to everybody who is reading along and who has left a comment -- you are all seriously gold to me and make my day brighter. *BIG SQUISHES*

“Dean?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s in my shoe.”

“What?” Dean sputtered on a laugh. “How does that even happen?”

“Well, you’re the expert. You tell me.” Castiel pushed the door to his apartment open with a relieved sigh. Home sweet home.

“Yeah but your shoe? That’s impressive. You take the first shower -- I’m used to this.”

It seemed a little rich to be offered dibs on his own shower, but Castiel wasn’t about to complain. He left Dean with an admonishment not to sit on anything, and Dean waved him off, already fumbling with his phone.

Castiel treated himself to a long and extremely thorough shower, hot enough to turn his skin rosy-pink, trying very hard not to think about anything. Not what he was washing down the drain. Not the man loitering in his living room who would soon be standing right here, just as naked as Castiel was now, using this exact same bar of soap. Nothing at all.

He stepped out of the steam and straight into his bathrobe; the air in the rest of the apartment was chilly enough to give him goosebumps. Dean had taken off his shoes and was standing carefully in the middle of the in the living room, thumbing through Cas’s record collection.

“You’d better not be getting entrails on my Cab Calloway,” Cas threatened.

Dean turned, surely ready with some protestation of innocence, but it died on his lips as his eyes dropped to Castiel’s state of undress as if falling victim to gravity. “Uh,” he stuttered, before blinking hard to recover himself. “What? Me? No. Just. You’ve got one hell of a collection here, man.”

“Thank you. Now go take a shower.”

Dean, not needing to be told twice, disappeared down the hall.

Castiel busied himself with getting dressed in fresh clothing, taking care of the worst of the mess on his coat, putting on one of the records Dean had been eyeing -- Robert Johnson, Crossroad Blues -- and being grateful for his sizable and effective hot water heater. All the while, despite his best efforts, his ear stayed tuned to the sounds echoing from his shower: water running, splashing, occasional humming that made him smile, and a few long throaty groans that made a pleasant heat flare below his belly. He tried, he really tried, but his imagination ran amok picturing soapy skin, wandering hands, hot slick friction... and he found himself absently and neurotically tidying his living room just to give himself something else to focus on.

Which was why he didn’t notice that the shower had stopped until Dean’s gentle “Hey Cas?” made him jump in surprise.

Dean stood framed by the hallway, wearing a towel. Just a towel. It wasn’t even slung scandalously low or anything -- Dean had it tucked high near his belly button and was fingering the tuck like he didn’t trust it not to betray him -- but he was _only wearing a towel_ and his own dewy flush, a few stray water droplets gracing his shoulders. And God help him, Cas was only human. He looked. He looked longer than he knew was polite. He looked until Dean was shifting awkwardly from foot to foot and blushing, actually _blushing_ behind a shy grin.

Castiel shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut against the vision of temptation in front of him. “Sorry -- what?” 

“I was wondering if I could borrow some PJs or something?” Dean asked, still with a smile in his voice. “Since my clothes are all still, y’know... covered in zombie.”

“Oh. Uh. Yeah. Of course.” Ignoring the fact that his legs felt weak and rubbery, Castiel crossed the room, intending to move past Dean into the hall that led to his bedroom. As he got closer he could smell his own citrus-sage soap on Dean’s skin, could feel the humid heat lingering around him and he ached to press his nose into the crook of Dean’s neck and just breathe there. But as he got closer, moving to edge past Dean into the hall, Dean didn’t move out of the way. He pulled up short. “Uh, I’ll just -- they’re in my...” Castiel couldn’t seem to force the word ‘bedroom’ past his lips.

“Or,” Dean said with a wry twist to his lips, his voice pitched low and suggestive. “We could skip that drink -- move straight on to the after party.” His smirk was all sexy confidence, but the wideness of his eyes said nervous, wanting, and Cas just --

There are moments in life you just can’t overthink. When a gorgeous man is effectively naked in your living room offering to do vague and nefarious things with you, you can’t afford to get all philosophical about it. You grab him by the neck and you kiss him until you are both breathless. Before he quite knew it, Castiel’s hands were full of Dean, the skin of his neck warm in Castiel’s grip, his hair damp when he brushed the edge of it with his thumb, his lips plush and pliant under Castiel’s assault. Dean’s breath stuttered out of him over Cas’s cheek like he’d been punched in the gut, but he opened eagerly to the touch of Castiel’s tongue. God, sweet -- so sweet, soft and wet. Cas groaned and pushed in, chest-to-chest, Dean falling open to his caresses. Cas felt Dean’s hands broad and hot on the small of his back, the shower’s residual heat bleeding off of him and through Cas’s clothing in seconds, and he let himself be enveloped in the circle of Dean’s arms. His hands scrabbled to find something to hold onto, but all he found was bare, damp skin. Not that he was complaining. He let his palms skate along the lines of Dean’s muscles. He was firm everywhere, strong shoulders and trim waist, but there was a softness over the strength that had Cas melting into him, pressing close. He dug his fingers into the tender flesh around his waist and Dean -- Dean _squirmed_ , breaking their kiss with a squawk and an undignified giggle. He gripped Castiel’s wrists in both hands and stared at him with a little deer-in-the-headlights look.

“Ticklish?” Cas asked with a devil’s grin.

“No,” Dean fibbed, then pushed back in to kiss him again. Cas decided not to press it, just opened his mouth on a moan and started walking backwards, dragging Dean with him. Dean came willingly, and they shuffled together until Cas’s heels hit the sofa. Dean followed him down, unwilling to break their kiss even when it devolved into nudging noses and playful nips at each others lips. He parted his knees to straddle Cas’s thighs, a solid weight in his lap, and Cas bowed up into him -- God, that towel was not going to last long at this rate. And Castiel, skidding his palms and fingers up the length of Dean’s thighs, saw no reason why it should.

“You are -- so gorgeous,” he breathed against Dean’s pulse, then leaned to brush his lips down one collarbone. His nose skipped on the damp skin; he felt Dean’s chest move with deep breaths, the rumble of his laugh. Dean’s fingers wound through Cas’s hair, maneuvering Cas’s lips down until they caught on a nipple. Subtlety was overrated, Cas thought as he pulled the tight nub between his lips, gentle teeth, following as Dean pressed tighter into him.

“This -- ah! -- this hardly seems fair,” Dean gasped.

“Hmmm?” Cas hummed, biting deeper.

“You -- you’re all dressed n’ shit.”

Cas laughed against Dean’s skin and let his hands slide up over the towel to rake his nails up and down Dean’s lumbar curve. “I dunno,” he growled, “I kind of like having you at a disadvantage,” and flashed Dean a predatory grin, leaning back up to lick and suckle over Dean’s Adam’s apple. He felt Dean’s moan of “Ahhhh fuck” vibrating against his lips, felt him swallow, felt a frission of heat and want when Dean grabbed his wrists again, this time to slide his hands down to where he clearly wanted them: right under the loosening towel, cupping the plush cheeks of Dean’s ass. With firm handfuls of flesh in each palm, Castiel groaned and his hips rolled of their own accord and he had to --

“Hang on,” he murmured, and separated them for a moment, reaching one hand between them and down the front of his jeans to adjust his erection. He couldn’t resist giving himself a little squeeze as he did so, sighing at the pressure.

“Oh -- hello,” Dean breathed. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You should,” Cas sighed, pulling his hand out of his jeans and noticing where Dean was noticeably tenting the towel. He couldn’t resist letting his knuckles brush up the underside of that hidden length -- Dean’s hips stuttered forward and he cried out “Mmmfffuck --!”

Castiel pulled his hand away, chuckling Dean’s whine and shifting, searching hips. “Patience,” he said, returning both hands to the curve of Dean’s ass, letting his fingers dip down into the hot, hidden crease between them.

“I’ll show you patience --” Dean growled, and then his hand was ghosting down Castiel’s fly, too light through the thick denim, and Castiel arched his hips up into the barely-there pressure, into the sparking sensation. Dean pushed harder, scratched lightning-trails with his fingernails, squeezed with his fingers, and Castiel squirmed and latched open-mouthed onto whatever bit of smooth skin was closest to his mouth, keening and suckling. Dean was just reaching for the button and zip when --

A knock at the door, Sam’s deep voice from the hall. “Cas? Dean? You guys home?”

Suddenly Dean was gone, his heat, his weight, just -- _gone_ , and Cas felt cold as if he’d been dropped in a puddle, and restless and frustrated to boot. He opened his eyes in time to catch a glimpse of that towel finally giving in to the inevitable and exposing the firm, round cheeks of Dean’s ass before Dean disappeared into the bedroom and -- _fuck_ that meant Dean was _naked in Cas’s bedroom,_ probably rooting through drawers looking for pajamas and his cock was probably still hard and that gorgeous ass bare _in his fucking room_ and Cas was ready to just ignore Sam outright and go join him, but --

“Uhh -- you guys in there? I got something.”

Sam “Piss Poor Timing” Winchester.

“Yeah, come on in Sam,” Cas said, not bothering to sit up properly on the sofa, nor even try to hide his aroused state or disheveled hair and clothing. He almost wished Dean had succeeded in getting his jeans open if only for the sake of making it explicitly clear to Sam what, exactly, he had interrupted. Though judging by the way Sam’s eyebrows climbed as he took in the scene, it was obvious enough.

“Is, uh -- where’s Dean?” he asked, sounding a little scared of the answer. Good. Let him be.

“In my bedroom, putting some clothes on.” Castiel crossed his arms over his chest, sour and definitely pouting a little.

The array of facial expressions making their way across Sam’s face was fascinating to watch, from blinking surprise to grimacing gross-out, and finally smoothing into calm and fond exasperation. “Okay. Well. Uh. Did you guys find anything?”

“I thought you said you had something?” Cas said with a squint in Sam’s direction.

“I do, but I’ll wait until Dean, uh -- comes out.”

Cas snorted, but he elected to pass over the low-hanging joke. “Well, yes, we did,” he said, sitting up a little straighter as his arousal started to bank. “We found a haunted house I wrote about.”

“And was it? Haunted, I mean.”

Cas frowned. “Not exactly. There were no ghosts or anything -- but there was a gang of zombies.”

“Zombies?” Sam pulled face, confused and incredulous.

“Yeah, honest-to-god Romero zombies,” Dean’s voice came from down the hall. Cas turned to look and all the lust came boiling back to the surface at the sight of Dean in Cas’s favorite flannel pajama pants and an over-washed ragged T-shirt. He knew exactly how soft that T-shirt was, and seeing it on Dean, the thought of his solid warmth wrapped in all that softness... God. Flannel pajamas and a ratty shirt shouldn’t be sexy, but every part of Castiel wanted to bite deep into Dean and not let go, wanted to wrap around him and cling, inhale him and keep him in his arms forever.

Dean must have sensed him staring, because he threw him wink that was all bravado even though the pink was still high in his cheeks. “Hope you don’t mind,” he said.

“Not at all,” Cas growled through a stuck throat. He saw Dean’s throat tighten as he swallowed and flushed even darker, but he moved to sit on the couch next to Castiel. No part of them was touching, but the space between their thighs sparked like a jacob’s ladder, fizzling with static attraction and making Castiel’s hair stand on end.

“Uh, so -- zombies.” Sam prompted.

“Yeah,” Dean replied, clearing his throat. “Yeah, we took care of ‘em. It was great -- you should’ve seen Cas here,” he grinned, smacking Castiel’s knee with the back of his hand. “First day on the job and he totally kicked ass.”

Now it was Castiel’s turn to blush under the incandescent heat of that grinning praise. “I wasn’t --” he started, then shook his head. “That’s not important. The pertinent fact is, I didn’t write about any zombies.”

“You didn’t?” Sam asked.

Castiel shook his head. “No. I wrote about the house, but no zombies.”

“Then where did they come from?”

Castiel shrugged. “I -- well, I was a bit vague in describing what _was_ there,” he admitted. “Maybe the journal misinterpreted?”

“Or maybe you were thinking zombies, even if you didn’t specify?” Dean suggested. “Maybe the journal manifested them that way for you. Like with the apples -- what did you call them? Honeysuckle?”

“Honeycrisp,” Cas corrected absently. That... was a thought. But it also felt like ice cubes dropping down into Castiel’s gut. Zombies and ghosts aside, it suddenly cast everything he’d been doing with Dean in a new and more sinister light. Just how far did the journal’s ability to interpret desires extend? How deeply could it read?

“That seems like an awfully specific mistranslation,” Sam mused.

Cas was busy enough with the growing guilty conscience gnawing at his belly that he didn’t see the worried crease fold between Dean’s eyebrows. He didn’t see him frown, looking Cas up and down, didn’t see him swallow his questions and turn deliberately to his brother. “Anyway, what have you got?” he asked.

Sam started pulling his laptop, research notes, and that infernal journal out of his satchel. Castiel felt the only-slightly-irrational urge to light the thing on fire. “Well, aside from the fact that the symbols are obviously Enochian, I couldn’t find much in the lore,” he said. “But when I went to the police station --” He handed a stack of photos to Dean; Castiel leaned closer. He saw a skull -- ribs -- a femur -- hand and arm bones --

“Where did these come from?” Dean asked.

“From Louise’s apartment,” Sam said. “I don’t know if Hannah knew about them.”

Castiel squinted at a picture of a scapula. “That still doesn’t explain where they actually came from.”

Sam conceded the point with a rocking of his head. “I can guess though,” he said. “They spiked my EMF reader so hard I thought it would break.”

Dean nodded. “So -- definitely related to the -- Can we call it something besides ‘the monster’? Cos that’s vague as hell. Why not Evil Cloud of Doom? Huh?”

Cas shot him a purse-mouthed stare; Sam just raised both eyebrows and tried not to laugh.

“Anyway,” Sam continued, “I also took a look at recent medical reports, and found one weird one. Jeremy Stanton. Perfectly normal, healthy guy, late 20s --” he passed over a medical file. “Bit of a hypochondirac but nothing out of the ordinary. He suddenly drops into a coma for a full twenty four hours. And when he comes to? Just this morning? He’s dying of every kind of organ failure the doctors have tests for.”

“Yikes. Sucks to be him,” Dean muttered.

“I went and talked to him. You know what he said happened, right before that coma? He felt cold. Strong winds out of nowhere. And a black fog coming right toward him.”

“No signs of possession?”

“None. Poured some Holy water over his ice chips -- nothing. But again -- strong EMF signals all over him.”

Dean leaned back into the sofa cushions and swiped a hand over the stubble on his chin. “So it doesn’t always kill outright,” he said. “Lends some credence to your theory about the zombies being corrupted kids,” he said to Cas, his mouth pulling sourly to the side. Sam's eyes turned down with sadness, but Castiel wasn’t listening. He was distracted by the buzzing of his phone on the coffee table, a familiar face flashing on the screen.

Gabriel.

Of course.

Dean picked it up even as Castiel sat forward, hand outstretched. His fingers closed over Dean’s, the phone trapped between them, and his breath swooped out of him again, the spark of those fingers -- but he pulled away. “I’ve gotta take this,” he said, scurrying off to his bedroom.

As soon as the door was shut he answered. “Not a good time,” he said, low and terse.

“Sorry little bro, it’s important.” Gabriel sounded serious. Gabriel _never_ sounded serious.

Castiel sighed. “What is it?”

“I’ve found something. You still have the journal, right?”

“Of course I do.”

“I’ve found a -- call it a procedure, alright? It will disrupt the magic of the journal and put everything back the way it was. Okay? There’s a few things you need --”

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said no, Gabriel. I won’t do it.”

Gabriel’s incredulous gaping was almost audible. “Cassie, listen to me. You are meddling with things you don’t understand, here. There could be repercussions --”

“I don’t care,” Castiel growled. “I can’t just destroy the people I’ve -- I can’t. They’re here now, they’re _people_ , Gabe, what gives me the right to --”

“What gave you the right to create them in the first place, huh? Stories are supposed to stay stories, Castiel! You don’t know what you’re dealing with here, and your little friends are not the only thing you brought out, now are they?”

Castiel bit his tongue. “We’re working on that.”

“We?”

“Me, Sam, Dean. We’re working on it, and we’re going to stop it. Their way. Alright? This is what they _do._ They hunt these things and they kill them. They can fight this.”

“Have you told them? Have you told them that you’re responsible for the damn thing, and for their own lives?”

“.....”

“I thought not. Listen. Castiel. Trust me. This is bigger than you realize, and you can’t run away from the consequences. You can’t let your feelings get in the way of what needs to be done.”

“I won’t. But I’m not just _killing them_ until I’ve explored all the other options. And that is final.”

Gabriel was silent for a beat. Then sighed. “Fine. If you change your mind, I’ll still be here. But you -- just. Be careful, alright? You’re the only little brother I have; I don’t want you getting hurt.”

For just a moment, Castiel felt guilty for being so hard. “I will. I promise.”

“And Cassie?”

“Yeah?”

“You really should consider telling them. Better late than never, right?”

Castiel sighed, squeezing his eyes shut tight against the truth he didn’t want to acknowledge. “Bye Gabe.”

He stood there with his phone pressed to his lips for a long time while the last of the sunlight faded and the room darkened around him. Wind howled in the eaves outside, the intermittent rain lashing against the window. He shivered.

A soft knock on his bedroom door startled him out of his daze. “Cas?” It was Dean; of course it was Dean. “Everything okay in there?”

With a heavy sigh, Castiel opened the bedroom door. Dean stood in the glow from the living room lights, still wearing Castiel’s soft things and worry creasing his face. Castiel still wanted to sink into the warm, comfortable solidity he offered, but... no. He did not have that luxury.

“You okay?” Dean asked again.

Castiel nodded. “I’m fine.” The compression of Dean’s lips said he didn’t believe him. One of his hands lifted toward Cas, perhaps to card through his hair or squeeze his shoulder -- but it dropped before the touch landed.

“We’re gonna get moving -- back to the motel. Um.” He stood there, wavering, halfway between leaving and staying. “Thanks for the PJs,” he said, finally, a crack of a smile on his lips.

Cas forced a smile that he knew had no heart in it. “You’re welcome.” He stepped out to walk Dean to the door, twitching away when their shoulders brushed in the narrow hallway. Sam was waiting, laptop and research in hand.

“We’ll be in touch,” Sam said, pulling the door open. Cas nodded.

“Yeah, we’ll see you tomorrow.” Dean stood another moment, searching Cas’s face, swallowing whatever words he wanted to say. Then he stepped backwards out the door, and followed his brother.

In the wake of their departure, the silence echoed around him like the cry of a living thing. It was suffocating. He heard nothing but the lash of rain and the buzz of idle electronics, the click of the record player long since quiet. He stood unmoving in the living room until his skin felt stiff, afraid to break the silence lest it shatter him in turn.

What the fuck was he doing.

He looked around carefully. The sofa -- tainted. His writing nook -- unbearable. Kitchen -- no. Bedroom -- no. Bathroom -- _fuck_ no.

How, in so brief a time, had his entire home, his life, become saturated with Dean Winchester?

All at once he could no longer stand it. Heedless of the stiffening rain outside, he snatched up his trenchcoat and fled into the night.

~*~

Who the fuck did he think he was? God? What gave him the right --?

Castiel stumbled over a crack in the pavement, lurching to the left and almost dropping paper-wrapped bottle that was currently the only real thing in his perception. It was considerably lighter than when he’d purchased it. That had been, what -- an hour ago? Three? Didn’t matter. Time was an illusion anyway.

Staggering through a park in the driving rain at midnight with the wind whipping the trees around as if they were stalks of grass, Castiel let himself feel everything, every ounce of confusion, guilt, fear, lust, joy, and self-flagellation that he could dredge up from inside himself. He relived the sensation of Dean pressed against him, warm and firm and perfect, and felt nothing but roiling disgust at himself. It wasn’t real. None of it was. Dean was only acting acting according to Castiel’s secret, twisted desires, and Castiel had taken advantage of that, taken advantage of _Dean--_

He had to tell him. But how could he bear it? How could he look into those _(incredible, captivating, soul-deep)_ eyes and tell him nothing you feel is real? Don’t trust it, because I put it there, and I am nothing --

What right did he have to keep up this charade? People were dying. Those creatures he’d killed without a second thought -- what if they had been _children_ , normal every day kids fallen under some spell of his doing? A young man dying in a hospital, a dear friend's only family... Perhaps it would be better if he took Gabriel’s advice. Put a stop to everything. End the monster -- the Evil Cloud of Doom _ha!_ \-- and the Roadhouse and Dean and Sam and all of it. Put everything back the way it had been before.

Sacrificing the Winchesters to save a few strangers. That... sounded par for the course, actually, but that didn’t mean Castiel had to like it.

A bench materialized under his legs as they collapsed under him. Small mercies, that bench. Castiel took another long pull from the bottle -- it was not good whiskey, but tonight did not deserve good whiskey, and at this point it was going down his throat like a hot summer’s lemonade. With the back of his hand he swiped at his eyes, trying to clear his vision, but he wasn’t sure if the rain or the liquor was to blame for the blurriness. Probably both. He lowered the bottle and stared through the rain curtain, brain a mass of static to match the hiss of the downpour.

“Why did I have to write him so fucking sexy?” he demanded of the clouded sky and moaning wind. It was more than just the physical though. He was drawn to Dean, like iron to a lodestone, like a moth to a flame, like a ship to a lighthouse and every other tortured metaphor he cared to list. Castiel spent the next several minutes just letting the rain wash over his face and trying out different metaphors before deciding that he was the magnet and Dean was the unwilling lump of iron that had no say in whether or not he was drawn to Castiel, but Castiel was also the moth and Dean was the candle flame and he would surely burn to death if he got too close.

Having decided that, he felt... not one bit better, actually.

When he lifted the liquor bottle to his lips again, it was mostly rainwater he sucked off the rim. The last dribbles of liquor oozed sluggishly onto his tongue. Fuck. Now he’d have to find another liquor store.

“Hey buddy!”

Castiel looked up and immediately regretted it when he locked gazes with the harsh beam of a flashlight. He clammed his eyes shut against the light and the spear of pain that followed it.

Maybe ixnay on the iquorlay orestay.

The flashlight was moving closer; Castiel could see it illuminating his feet when he squinted his eyes open, casting long bobbing shadows that messed with his already-hazy perceptions. “Park’s closed buddy. You can’t be here,” the cop informed him. As if that was _news._

“You know of any liquor stores nearby?” Castiel asked.

“I think you’ve had enough. C’mon pal. Let’s get you out of here.” The cop took hold of Castiel’s arm above the elbow and started to pull. Castiel drew back, over-balancing and listing sideways, perilously close to lurching right off the bench and into the mud.

“Whatever,” he mumbled. “I probably invented you anyway.”

“Ok, mister. You don’t wanna move? I can move you.”

Castiel snorted and tried not to laugh out loud because it made his head hurt. He managed it down to a high-pitched snicker, chin tucked to his chest. “I’d like to see you try,” he said. “I killed zombies today. Zombies!”

“I’m sure you did, pal. Come on.” The cop was gripping Castiel more firmly now, pulling at his arm. Cas saw a glint of handcuffs in his other hand and reacted on gut instinct -- he swung the empty bottle in its paper bag directly at the officer’s head. It connected with a solid thunk and shatter; the paper bag crumpled around the broken glass. The officer shouted and Castiel took advantage of his momentary loosened grip to make his escape. Or try to. He made it maybe ten paces before his blind dash ended with slippery, unsteady feet on the slick grass, and a thud as he fell face-first into mud. In less than a heartbeat there was a weight on his back and a cold dread snapped through Castiel’s bones. Was it the cop? Or the creature?

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you --”

“Blow it out your ass!” Castiel shouted, squirming ueslessly against the weight and professional grip on his arms. He managed to avoid getting his ass handcuffed by sheer drunken luck, and then suddenly --

\-- The weight was gone. Castiel heard the man roll off, grunting as if he’d been struck, and then footsteps in the damp grass.

“No,” the officer moaned. “You -- It’s not -- It can’t be --” He no longer sounded either cajoling or threatening. Now he sounded terrified.

Castiel rolled on his back and elbows, crawling backwards as quick as he could. In the strange slanting light of the officer’s dropped flashlight, he watched the cop lunging at nothing -- no, not at nothing -- at shadows.

The creature.

Four thick sections of shadow peeled off out of the darkness surrounding them, between the trees outside the lamplight. They circled the cop, human-shaped but moving like snakes, closing in slowly and hissing, whispering.

“You --” Castiel heard, a dry sibilant hiss under the rain “-- you stood bye. You watched me die and you did _nothing_ ”

“You call yourself an officer of the law? You could have stopped it and you didn’t. You will PAY.”

“You are a monster. You knew it was wrong. And you did NOTHING.”

“We are coming for you. You have failed us. Now we will have our revenge.”

“No -- NO PLEASE!” the officer cowered as the taunts continued, the voices of his past mistakes haunting him, hounding him. Castiel lay in the damp grass, frozen in place, as they converged on their target. He tried to flee and the shadows snapped him up, tossed him back, enveloped him in their blanket of fear, muffling his screams -- and then the sound of a gunshot, twice, three times, as the vaguely-visible body jerked and blood fountained from his chest -- and then silence..

The dark shadows retreated, leaving Castiel all alone with only the rain, the wind going still in the trees above. In the distance a dog barked at nothing. A car alarm went off. A distant siren. It all sounded so very far away. Castiel stood on shaky legs, tried not to think about the lifeless lump on the ground nearby.

He tried not to think about _anything._

With slow, jagged steps, his limbs all shaking like twigs, he made his way back home.

~*~

By the time he was home, Castiel could barely keep his feet moving forward, and his eyes were gummy with exhaustion and fading drunkenness. He collapsed on his sofa face-first, but the adrenaline shake of his limbs would not allow him to just pass out. After a few minutes he pulled himself up with a groan, staggering to the kitchen. No matter how much his stomach rebelled, he forced himself to chug two large glasses of water, filled a third, then picked his way slowly back to the couch. He kicked off his shoes, shrugged out of his trenchcoat -- left it tucked under him, dampness be damned, at least the rain had washed out the last of the zombie-guts -- and dug out his phone. He was calling Dean before he could think better of it.

Dean answered on the fifth ring, just before Cas was considering giving up before the thing went to voicemail. “Hey,” Dean murmured, fuzzy with sleep and affection. Castiel’s heart constricted at the sound of it and he shut his eyes tight.

“Hi.” All at once Castiel could not fathom why he’d called or what he’d thought he could say. It occurred to him that maybe he'd just wanted to hear Dean's voice, and if that didn't feel like broken glass slicing under his ribs....

“So, uh -- how’s it going?” Cas could almost hear Dean’s wince.

“Not... not great,” he admitted.

“Yeah, I don’t usually get calls in the middle of the night for good reasons.” Cas could hear the blankets rustling in the background and tried not to picture it -- maybe Dean was still wearing Castiel’s own pajamas -- tried not to wish he could burrow into the blankets with him and just... hide. From all of it. “Talk to me. What’s up?”

There were so many things Castiel wanted to say -- or felt he should say, regardless of wanting -- that they all seemed to get caught together behind his teeth. “There’s been another attack,” he said. “I saw this one happen.”

“Wait, what? Are you okay?” The sleepy fuzziness was gone from Dean’s voice. Castiel missed it immediately.

“I -- Mostly.” He could still feel the liquor swirling around behind his eyes and he would probably have the world’s worst hangover in the morning, but he would survive. “It went after a police officer who was trying to arrest me.”

“He -- wait. Why?”

“I might have hit him over the head.”

“What??”

“With an empty liquor bottle.”

“Cas, what --”

“I was very drunk.”

Stunned silence on Dean’s end. When he spoke, it was quiet. “Does that have anything to do with why you got all quiet earlier?”

That was -- not exactly the question Cas had been expecting. “Yes,” he said without thinking.

“What’s going on, Cas? I mean -- if you -- if you didn’t want to --”

“It’s not that, Dean.” Oh God in Heaven, that was not the problem.

“Then what?”

Silence.

“Look,” Dean sighed. “Just -- we’ll be over in the morning, okay? Just get some sleep.”

Castiel sighed and raked his fingers through his hair, tugging until he felt a few strands pull free so he had an excuse for the water in his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Goodnight, Dean.”

“G’night, Cas. Sleep tight.”

If they both lingered just a few breaths longer before hanging up, neither would admit it in the morning.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh this chapter took longer to get out than I'd hoped it would. Blame work. :P On the plus side, it's extra long, so... enjoy!
> 
> If you look closely you might notice that I changed the date stamps... Not that it matters much to anyone but me but if you do happen to notice, don't worry, you're not crazy, I just miscalculated my dates.
> 
> A very happy Turkeyday to my American readers! ^__^

October 30th

“Woah,” said Dean. “You look like hammered crap, Cas.”

Castiel would have rolled his eyes, but his head felt like it was full of razor blades already, so he didn’t. “That sounds accurate," he muttered, moving aside to let the Winchesters into his apartment.

“Well -- we brought reinforcements,” Dean held up a large coffee and a bag of doughnuts. “Best I could find. You like plain, frosted, or cream-filled?”

Cas’s stomach did a barrel roll, but he figured it was probably better to eat something, even if it was straight sugar. He took the coffee and sipped with a grateful sigh. “Better be plain today,” he said.

By the time Cas looked up again Dean had a chocolate frosted doughnut with sprinkles hanging halfway out of his mouth and was holding out a plain one in his direction. He might have been grinning behind his sugary confection of a breakfast. Cas couldn’t help but smile back as he accepted the offering.

Sam, meanwhile, had set up his laptop on the coffee table. “Okay,” he said. “Castiel -- can you tell us what happened last night?”

Cas gingerly swallowed a bite of doughnut and started to tell the tale. He glossed over the reasons why he was out drinking, though Dean’s curiosity and concern were palpable. It had been a difficult week. He was an adult and could drink himself into a stupor if he wanted to. 

By the time he was finished, Sam’s face was set into grim lines. “That fits with a theory I’ve been working on. But --” he held up a hand to forestall comment from Dean. “I don’t want to say anything else until I take a trip down to the morgue and do some digging on this officer. I was going to ask if you wanted to come with me, Cas, but --”

Castiel sucked in a breath as nausea rolled over him. He set down the remaining half of his doughnut and said, “Better not.” However well-intentioned that doughnut had been, it may not have been a good idea. It rolled around in Cas’s stomach like a ball of glue and the sugar made his headache spike. He tried coffee again, hoping for the clearing effect of caffeine, but the acid just burned. “In fact, I think I’d better go lay down again,” he said and started to peel himself off the couch. Dean’s hands were there in a moment, one at his elbow and the other hovering at the small of his back, not quite touching but definitely _there._

The next thing Castiel was fully aware of was the softness of his own pillow cradling his cheek and his sheets and quilt being pulled up to his shoulders. Every single part of his body was still screaming in protest at the vigorous poisoning he’d treated it to, but he had to admit, his bed very... very comfortable.

A stray thought wandered through his mind. "You didn’t drug me, did you?”

Dean snorted, closer than Cas had thought he was. “No, I promise you those were drug-free doughnuts.”

Cas nodded against the pillow, then pulled open one gummy eyelid. Dean was kneeling next to the bed, fingers of one hand curled on the bedspread a careful distance from where Castiel had his hands tucked to his chest. He was looking at Castiel with an expression of -- fond worry? Curious interest?

The moment passed as soon as it came, and Dean licked his lips before speaking. “Listen -- I’d like to search your apartment for hexbags.”

It was enough of a non-sequitor that it broke through Castiel’s fuzziness. “Hexbags?”

“Yeah. They’re --” Dean cut himself off with a shake of his head. “We just want to make sure there’s no witch involved. This thing isn’t behaving like any regular spook we’ve ever tackled, so we’re trying to cover our bases. ”

“Like witchcraft.”

“Yeah, like witchcraft.”

Castiel closed his eyes and rolled deeper into the pillow. “Does it involve me moving?” he muttered, half-muffled.

“Not in the slightest.”

“Then knock yourself out.”

“You’re a peach,” Dean grinned, patting Castiel’s hip once before hopping to his feet. He started in the bedroom, keeping up a pleasant idle chatter as he dug through Castiel’s drawers, ran his fingers under the edge of the dresser, the bed frame, behind the headboard. He told Cas about the theories they’d already eliminated -- demon, shapeshifter, tulpa, a few others -- shared a few lively tales about their encounters with such things in the past. Castiel zoned in and out, grateful for the distraction of a conversation that didn’t require his active participation, just enjoying the sound of Dean’s voice as he moved around the room.

Dean paused his nattering when he opened the bedside table drawer. “Woah.”

Castiel pried open one eye -- then blushed furiously when he realized what Dean had stumbled across.

“Those are -- um.”

“Hey man, I get it. A guy’s got needs.”

“They’re all clean, if you need to... y’know.” He waved his hand vaguely.

Dean shook his head, laughing as he and pulled the drawer out further and started picking carefully through Castiel’s extensive and widely-varied collection of dildos, plugs, and other toys. “This would be a great place to hide a hexbag, that’s for sure. Besides, I might need to size up the competition. As it were.” He threw a saucy wink at Castiel.

Cas groaned, his face hot with -- not embarrassment, per se, but -- “That’s not --”

“Should I be worried?” Dean was holding up a huge purple monstrosity with a fully engorged knot at the base.

“For the love of --” Cas snatched the dildo out of his hand and shoved it to the deepest depths of the drawer. “If you’re just going to make fun of me --”

Dean laughed and grinned at him. “Don’t worry -- I’m just teasing.” He took a quick glance to the back of the drawer, then shot Castiel a wink as he shut it. “And hey -- now I know where to look for the lube. Might come in handy.” There was lift to his eyebrows and a toothy little grin that Cas couldn’t help returning.

“You sure are sure of yourself,” Cas said, flopping back on the pillow.

Dean stalled beside the bed, toying with the corner of his coat. “Honestly, with you, no I’m not,” he said. “I, uh -- there’s something....”

Castiel lay very still.

With a shake of his head and a clearing breath, Dean moved toward the bedroom door. “WELL, no hexbags in here. I’ll just -- I should check out there.” If he tripped a little on his on feet on the way out the door, Castiel would do him the favor of pretending not to notice.

Castiel relaxed back into the mattress, feeling like he’d dodged a bullet and trying to ignore the wriggling worm of guilt in his belly for just a few minutes longer.

He was out of excuses. He had to tell him and there was no way around it.

From down the hall he could hear Dean humming a tuneless tune, a sweet baritone accompaniment to the shuffling of knicknacks and searching fingers. Warm affection bled through Castiel’s chest, and he hugged his pillow closer, smiling into it. He could get used to hearing that. He let his limbs weigh down into the softness of his bed, drifting on pleasant daydreams where he could wake up to that voice every morning -- maybe accompanied by the smell of cooking pancakes. Maybe murmuring soft words in his ear. Maybe singing in the shower. Just a few more minutes, he told himself. Maybe when his head felt less like it was being smashed in with a hammer. He would tell him. He really would. Just as soon as he got out of bed.

Some time later a silence roused him from a doze. The humming had stopped. In its place he heard an occasional rustle of a page.

Cold realization sliced through his warm lassitude.

Oh. Oh no.

Castiel scrambled out of the bed, dizziness and sore muscles be damned, his heart jack-knifing against his ribs. “Dean, wait, I --”

When he rounded the hall he saw Dean on the sofa, bent over a stack of papers with his head in his hands. He didn’t turn until Castiel had stumbled out into the living room; when he looked up, his face was like a granite cliff, cold and forbidding.

“I can explain,” Castiel offered weakly.

“Too late.” That voice -- it cut as closely now as it had soothed moments before. Dean stood, pages in hand, Castiel’s handwriting bold and incriminating on every surface. “What the hell is this? Is this -- are these what I think they are?”

Castiel sagged under the weight of defeat. “Yes. Those are -- pages from the journal.”

“They’re talking about _us_ \-- me and Sam, our _family._ ” Castiel opened his mouth, but Dean crowded forward, large as a thunderstorm. “What the HELL, man? When exactly were you planning on telling me this?”

Castiel gaped, his reasons and defenses all crowding in his throat and sticking there. “I -- I know that I should have. Right from the start. But --”

“But what? You were too chickenshit?”

“YES!” Castiel exploded, feeling a hot tear well off his lid. “I was scared, alright? Scared I was going crazy, scared you would think I was crazy even if I was right, _terrified_ of some monster that I had apparently created -- and then I was just scared of this exact conversation!”

Dean shoved the papers into Castiel’s chest and he stumbled back. “That’s a bullshit excuse and you know it _Castiel._ You should have told us, you should have told _me,_ before I went and --” Dean choked, his jaw working.

“Dean, I -- I know I should have. And I’m sorry.” 

“My whole life,” Dean forced through gritted teeth, staring hard but not at Castiel. “My whole shitty fucked up life -- my mom. The crap me and Sam had to go through. All of that. Is on you. You are the one responsible for -- _all_ of it.” Two fat tears tracked down his cheeks.

“I didn’t know this would happen. I swear. How could I?”

“Why? Just-- why me?” All at once he sounded so, so small.

Castiel spread his hands wide. “Because that’s what happens to people in stories, Dean. Their lives suck. That’s what makes their stories interesting. And -- and stories --” He bit his lip, feeling iron bars constrict around his chest. This was going to hurt. “Stories are supposed to stay stories. If I had known -- I wouldn’t have --”

“Don’t.”

When Castiel looked up, Dean’s whole visage was contorted with anguish, from his brow to his neck to his hand in a fist. “Please don’t,” he said again, barely a breath.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t say you wouldn’t have ever --” He gestured to himself and the world around him. Some of the tension left him as he laughed, a damp bedraggled thing. Dean swiped at his face, then looked up, eyes wet and bleary. “That would be way too easy.”

Castiel blinked, cocked his head to the side -- then reached forward on instinct to pull Dean into his arms.

Dean stepped back, hands raised and a twitch of his chin. Defensive. Castiel froze, then let his arms fall in clenching-releasing fists to his sides, impotent. Useless.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

Dean sniffed and turned away.

Sam chose that moment to burst in, this time not bothering to knock.“Hey -- I think I’ve figured it out --” He stilled as he realized he had once again interrupted something important.

Dean shot off like a bullet from a gun. “Me too,” he said. “Look at this.”

Sam set down his laptop bag and took the pages, still looking between Cas and Dean in crinkled-browed confusion. It didn’t take more than five seconds of looking through the pages for the furrow to smooth out of his brow. “Oh.”

“Damn right, ‘Oh.’ Somebody forgot to tell us something.” Dean wielded the words like blades and Castiel felt them cut deep.

“Dean, I -- I already know,” Sam admitted. Dean’s head snapped around so fast that Cas worried for his neck.

“You -- wait, what?” He looked back at Cas. “Did you tell him?”

“No, he didn’t,” Sam answered for him. “I didn’t _know_ know, but I suspected.”

Dean and Castiel both stared at him. “You just, what, had a hunch that I had invented you out of whole cloth?” Castiel asked. Sam shrugged.

“Pretty much. It wasn’t that hard to put together, honestly.” His half-a-grin fell off his face when it failed to break the tension.

“Perfect,” said Dean with a roll of his eyes. “Anything else you’d like to share with the class?” he asked Castiel.

“Yes,” he said without hesitation. There was a weight in the pit of his stomach and he was completely certain that he would regret this, but he was past due for honesty. “My brother. I talked to him about this before I met you both. He found a -- he said it was a procedure that would reverse the journal’s effects.”

Sam blinked. Dean just stared hard off to the side. “You mean a spell?”

Castiel shrugged. “I suppose.”

Sam chewed on a lip. “So -- reversing all of its effects would -- what would that mean?”

“Exactly what I said, Sam.” He paused, sparing glances for Dean. “Everything would go back to the way it was before. No creature. No Roadhouse. No... no you. Either of you. You would be... just a story again.”

Sam blinked and worked his mouth like he was chewing on something. Dean just stared a hole in the floor.

It was a long moment before Dean broke the silence. “But people would stop dying, right?”

Sam’s head whipped around to stare hard at Dean, then back at Castiel. “No,” he said shortly.

“Presumably, yes, they would,” Castiel interjected.

“Dean, there has to be another way. We’ll find it. We always do.”

“We always find it because he wrote it that way,” Dean said with a jabbed finger in Castiel’s direction. “We’re not in his story anymore, Sam. We shouldn’t be here at all. We don’t exist. If we go, the whole thing goes, and that --” He turned and for just a moment jade green eyes collided with sapphire blue. “-- That’s for the best.”

Castiel’s eyes slammed shut, guilt and shame seeping through him. He fantasized for a moment about writing himself a time machine so he could go back half an hour -- a day -- to the start of all this -- any time he could fix what he’d broken.

He jumped at the touch of a hand to his elbow. It was Sam. “Hey. Can we talk for a minute?” Cas nodded and led the way back to his bedroom.

Whatever he expected out of this conversation, it was certainly not Sam’s gentle “Are you alright?” It startled him into honesty.

“No,” he said. “No, I’m very much not.”

Sam pressed his lips together and nodded. “Look -- Give him time, okay?”

“We don’t have time, Sam. Not with that thing out there and a way to defeat it just a phone call away.”

Sam waved his hands as if clearing that suggestion from the air. “We’ll find another way, alright? I’m not giving up.”

Castiel was already shaking his head. “What if there is no other way? We don’t know anything else about it -- we don’t even know what to call it. How are we supposed to fight it?”

Unexpectedly, Sam grinned, broad and bright. “Maybe not -- but I found a way to track it. That’s what I was going to tell you guys before all of that went down.” Sam took advantage of Castiel’s momentary stunned silence to grip both shoulders and say “Look. I know my brother. Okay? He likes you. He wouldn’t be taking this so hard if he didn’t like you. And that means that it’s going to be difficult, but he will come around.”

Castiel tried to squirm out of Sam’s grip. “You’re not helping as much as you think you are,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

Castiel sighed. Might as well get it all out. “When I -- he was. I.” A thick swallow. “I think I might have made him -- have feelings for me.”

Sam’s eyebrows climbed and he let go of Cas’s shoulders. “You mean you, what -- wrote him that way?”

“Not intentionally,” he was quick to say. “I had no intention of making him anything other than heterosexual, and obviously I wasn’t expecting any of this. But... there was an element of wish fulfillment when I was creating him. And if the journal can somehow... read desires farther than just what you’ve written about.... then I...” He broke off, swallowing hard.

“Hey. Look. We’re here now, okay? We’re out of the story, and Dean is his own person. He can make his own decisions.”

Castiel chewed on his lips and shut his eyes.

“Did you tell him?”

Castiel shook his head. “Not yet, but I will.”

“Yeah, why don’t I just save you the trouble.” Cas whipped his head around at Dean’s voice from the door. He was leaned against the door frame with his arms crossed, and the hard fury from earlier had been replaced with a flat, blank devastation. It was worse. It was so much worse.

“Dean, I --”

“If you say one more word to me I will break you.” Dean locked eyes with Castiel, and the piercing hate, the betrayal in that stare... Castiel felt like a butterfly pinned to a board, wings still fluttering as the life drained out of him. His head hung low. “Sam -- you said something about tracking?”

Sam nodded -- “My laptop,” he muttered, and edged around Dean with a worried backward glance.

Dean didn’t follow right away. Just stood there with Castiel pinned in his gaze. For a brief eternity, Castiel stood before his judgment while a thousand weak, pointless defenses screamed inside him. There was no defending what he’d done. There was only penance and retribution. “Dean, I’m --”

“Stop.” Dean cut him off and Cas’s jaw clicked closed. “Just. Stop.”

And then he did the very last thing Castiel expected of him: He crossed the distance between them with three brisk steps, took Cas’s face between his hands, and kissed him.

It was not a nice kiss. It hurt. In more ways than one. Castiel went limp and passive under him, half surprised, yielding to Dean’s forceful tongue and sharp teeth. Dean’s fingers snarled in his hair and yanked his head back, opening him further, and he gasped. There was a growl in Dean’s chest and desperation in the clutch of his fingers; the hitching of his breath was suspicious of a sob.

Castiel responded tentatively, meeting hard parries with cautious flicks of his tongue. He heard his own whimper from a long way away, felt the burn of his own tears and his fingers clinging at Dean’s waist. Soon he could barely keep up with Dean’s lips for the sobs billowing in his chest.

Then Dean wrenched away, pushing Cas to arms length and holding him there, hands firm on his shoulders. He stared down at the floor between their feet, breathing heavy and shaky. Cas just watched him, feeling a kind of tingling sorrow in all the places they had been connected.

Without so much as a glance at Castiel, Dean moved back and away, releasing his shoulders. “Sammy!” he called out the door. “What’ve we got?”

Alone in his bedroom, Castiel keenly felt his losses and tried not to weep.

~*~

Sam’s tracking device, such as it was, turned out to be a clever method of expanding their EMF reader’s range using a combination of Google Maps and fiber-optic internet lines. He’d offered to explain, but Dean had nixed that impulse with a look. They could see blinking red dots marking the Roadhouse, the haunted house to the north, the man in the hospital, the bones in the police station, the Impala... the apartment.

“That’ll be us,” Sam said, pointing. “And probably the journal too.”

Dean just grunted. “And this helps us how?”

Sam took a deep breath. “Last night. When it attacked Officer Melvin --”

“The guy’s name is Melvin?” Dean asked with a skeptical lift of an eyebrow.

Sam nodded. “Apparently. Anyway, I saw that happen. I was keeping an eye on the tracker and --”

“And where was I?”

“Asleep, Dean,” Sam said with an eye-rolly bitchface.

“And you couldn’t wake me up for something like this?”

Sam shrugged. “I didn’t quite have all the pieces together. I knew the weird EMF patterns were important, but it took a few pieces falling into place to make me sure of what we’re dealing with.” 

“And what exactly is that?” Dean asked.

“Fear.” Sam paused for a beat, but Dean just squinted at him. Sam turned to Castiel, who hovered in the hallway. “Cas, you never finished this story, right? And you never really clearly defined the monster?”

Castiel shook his head. “You can’t give away your big reveal right at the start.”

“So what you were really writing about wasn’t a monster of any kind -- it was fear. And that’s what we’re dealing with.”

Dean was squinting. “How does that tie back to the victims?”

Sam grinned. “That’s the clever part. All of the victims have died in ways that they were particularly afraid of. Louise -- an old woman close to death, found surrounded by bones. Stanton in the hospital -- a hypochondriac dying of everything. Those kids? I found them too -- they were part of a Zombie Apocalypse Survival club in their high school.”

Cas frowned. “So they weren’t just a misinterpretation?”

Sam shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it. They must have snuck into the house and then their own fears turned them into what they were afraid of. And Officer Melvin’s record wasn’t so squeaky clean. I’d bet you anything he was haunted by his past mistakes.”

Castiel nodded. “That fits with what I saw last night,” he confirmed, terse and blank, his arms crossed tight over the ache in his chest.

Dean just shook his head with a huff. “Alright. Awesome. So we’re fighting a Boggart.”

“A what?” Cas asked.

Dean drew breath and looked like he was about to ask what rock Cas had been living under -- but then he remembered that he was angry and scowled. “Nevermind. How do we fight it?”

“Just like we fight anything else,” Sam said. “If we don’t have something specific, we’ll just throw everything we got at it until something sticks. At least now we’ll have an idea of where it’s going to be.”

“And if that doesn’t work? This isn’t exactly a run-of-the-mill stake-and-shoot, Sam.”

Sam was quiet. Cas could see his temple flexing as he chewed on their dilemma. He took a deep breath. “If this doesn’t work... maybe we can work something out with that spell Cas’s brother has.”

Cas took a step forward. “Sam -- no --”

“Hey, butt out,” Dean barked. “This ain’t your fight anymore.”

“I beg to differ,” Castiel volleyed back with a glare, his mouth drawn tight. “Whatever else happened here, I brought this creature into this world. I brought _you_ into this world. Those deaths are already on my hands, and adding yours to the count is not the way to fix anything. I will make this right.”

Dean looked up at Castiel then, pinch-faced and sullen but their gazes caught and held, and the weight of that eye contact rocked Castiel to the core. This. This was where he had to make his stand. He sucked in air and said “Please. Let me try to make this right.”

It was a long dead-silent moment before Dean’s tongue flicked out to wet his lips and he nodded, a measure of tension leaving his shoulders. “Okay,” he said. The tiniest impression of a dimple peeked into the corner of his lips, and Castiel’s heart fluttered wildly against its cage. Dean held up a finger in warning. “I’m not saying I trust you.” _I’m not saying I forgive you,_ Castiel heard. “But you can come with us. Just try not to get yourself killed.” Dean stood then and made for the door. Sam scrambled with his laptop and duffle to follow.

Castiel stood rooted for a moment, breathing hard -- until Dean’s head poked back through his front door. “Hey! Get dressed. You want in on this Scooby gang, the bus don’t wait forever.”

~*~

They drove around the city for hours, chasing blips on the radar that sputtered and died before they got a chance to find them. By the time they got a strong, steady signal, blue dusk was sinking low over the skyscrapers; clouds of crows were making a ruckus in the evening air.

The area between the highway and the river was full of abandoned or condemned warehouses, factories, shipping yards, all leftover from a time when more industry and transport happened by boat. The broken windows and cracked facades stared down at them like empty eyes, crooked teeth; a dusty breath of wind rattled the eaves as they drove at a crawl through the streets.

“There,” Sam said, pointing. “That’s it.”

“You sure?” Dean asked, squinting at the building even as he parked in front of it.

Sam gave a shrug of a sigh. “As I’ll ever be.”

Castiel followed Sam and Dean out of the car and around to the trunk where they picked through their arsenal in the fading light. He let his gaze roam over the weapons he could see -- machetes, hunting knives, little silver pig-stickers, handguns, shotguns, and incongruous items like rosaries, flasks of holy water, pouches of dust and herbs, and canteens of salt. He was about to open his mouth to ask for recommendations when a glint of gleaming silver caught his eye. Before he quite knew it, he had it closed in his fingers.

The blade was long and straight, sharply tapered, and it was bright even in the dusk as if glowing under its own power. The heavy hilt fit just right in Castiel’s palm and he felt a thrill run up his arm. It felt like an extension of his arm -- like it belonged in his hand. He gave it an experimental twirl and in spite of everything, he grinned.

Dean, however, was frowning at him. “I’m not sure you’re gonna want to get close enough to the thing to use that.”

“I might not have much of a choice,” Castiel said. He tucked the blade into his coat and met Dean’s considering gaze head-on, daring him to challenge.

“Alright,” he said at last, shaking his head. “But take these too --” and he handed Cas a sawed-off shotgun and some extra salt rounds, a long iron crowbar, and started to hand him a pearl-handled pistol before pulling it back. “You do know how to use all this stuff, right?”

Castiel nodded tersely. “I was a boy scout for a while.”

Dean stared at him, clearly unimpressed.

“Do you want me to prove it?” Castiel asked, racking a shotgun shell and taking aim at one of the few unbroken windows.

Dean’s hand tight on his elbow stopped him. “Wait, no! -- The hell do you think you’re doing?” Dean hissed. “Ring the fricking doorbell why don’tcha?” But he let Castiel have the pistol with an admonishment not to waste the silver bullets. 

Bags of weapons slung on their shoulders, Cas and Dean met Sam at a side door into the warehouse. It was locked -- but that didn’t seem to be much of an issue for a determined Winchester with a lock pick. In moments they were slipping through the door. Sam closed it behind them with a click.

In the dark, Castiel could sense the cavernous space around them; the only light was the fast-fading blue filtering through sporadic skylights and high, narrow windows.

“Flashlights?” Castiel asked in a low whisper that sounded as loud as a gunshot.

“Not yet,” Dean answered.

They crept onward, peering through the advancing gloom, keeping to the perimeter of the space. It took him probably longer than it should have to realize that Sam was not immediately behind him, and when he did he pulled up short. “Where’s --”

“He went the other way,” Dean whispered back, not pausing in his slow, careful walk.

By the time they had circled the whole of the warehouse, picking their way around shelves and broken pallets, the subtle blue glow had all but disappeared, leaving muted city-haze orange at the edges of pitch black. They met up with Sam on the other side. “Clear,” he whispered, and as one the brothers pulled out their flashlights. Cas followed a moment after. Dean flicked his on --

A face, smirking in the sudden light.

“Woah!” Dean’s shocked cry echoed in the emptiness and his flashlight fell from his grip, its beam throwing crazy spins of light in all directions as it clattered to the floor. Sam swung his own light all around, searching the shadows but whoever it was -- whatever it was -- the face was gone.

“Was that who I think it was?” Sam asked, shaken.

“Yeah, Sammy, I think so,” Dean answered, stooping to retrieve his flashlight.

“Azazel,” Castiel whispered, sweeping the beam of his own flashlight over the debris all around them. Both brothers looked at him sharply, then shared a purse-mouthed look. But Castiel wasn’t listening. He had his ears pricked forward, seeking.

“Fan out,” Dean growled. “Cas, take that side. Sammy --”

“What are we looking for?” Cas asked.

“Better question is what do we do when we find it?” Dean answered.

“Your confidence is very reassuring,” Castiel snarked.

“Hey, you know what --” Dean turned his flashlight on Cas, jaw set, hackles up.

“Guys! Is this really the time?” Sam demanded, staring at both of them like they’d spouted extra heads. Dean clamped his mouth shut with a short glare at Cas, and then he moved out. Sam and Cas followed in their respective positions.

It almost might have been better without the flashlight, Cas thought. Maybe then he could have developed some dark vision, some sense of the space, and his mind might not be consumed with fretting curiosity about what was hiding just beyond the edge of the beam. He swung his light back and forth over every hulking shape -- busted machines, half-empty shelves -- and the resultant shadows lept at the corners of his vision.

“Don’t panic,” he breathed to himself, “don’t panic don’t panic don’t panic,” but it was like telling yourself not to think of a pink elephant. His heart started to pound, his breath came in short shaky gasps, and shivers swept up and down his spine, first hot then cold. Then all at once a chill struck through him, freezing his muscles to his bones. He barely registered dropping his flashlight from numb fingers, or falling to his knees, until the pain shocked up his limbs. “Cas!” Dean’s voice, and then he was there, hands on Castiel’s shoulders, slapping his face trying to bring life back to his eyes.

A cruel laugh echoed all around them and Castiel doubled over, trembling, hands clapped over his ears. From out of the shadows, a cold wave of deeper darkness swept over them, too fast for Dean to take aim. It swept like a cloak and coalesced on the other side of the space, where Sam’s will-o-the-wisp face bobbed in the darkness. Dean could just barely see him scramble backwards from where the shadows were deepest, impenetrable, his flashlight beam falling on solid black. 

“Sammy, Sammy, Sammy,” came that dreadful, taunting sneer. “My favorite. All that power -- and your daddy brought you up right. You --” that sick fond sigh “-- I was rooting for you, Sammy-boy. Why didn’t you take the prize, huh? Why?”

“Stay away!” Sam’s voice had gone high, panicked.

“You could have been great, Sammy. The best. And you know it. You still think about it sometimes, doncha? You think about how you could have been the Boy King of Hell and had all those demons under your command. Oh, obviously you wouldn’t do anything bad -- just... use them... for your own certainly noble purposes.”

“You’re not real! I know you’re not!” Sam stuttered, tripping backwards.

Azazel just chuckled. “Oh, Sammy. I’m as real as you think I am --”

BLAM!

The crack of a shotgun blast and the figure scattered under a spray of salt. Dean scrambled to his brother’s side, skidding over broken glass on the way. “Sam! You alright?”

Sam was panting, wide-eyed, but uninjured. “Yeah,” he gasped. “Yeah I’m alright. Did you --?”

“Salt -- should buy us a few minutes. C’mon.” Dean tugged at Sam’s arm and started to make his way back toward Cas, but --

There, blocking his path --

Dean’s voice came out weak and small --

“Dad?”

“Where is he, Dean?” With a cold, menacing growl, John Winchester advanced on his oldest son. “I told you to look after him. Where. Is. He?”

Dean stumbled a step backwards, eyes wide and breath fogging in front of his face. “I -- I dunno, Dad -- I dunno what happened --”

Sam looked back and forth between Dean and the apparition. “I’m right here! Dean! Dad, I’m right here!” Sam yelled, barely two steps away from either of them, but it fell on deaf ears. The figure of their father kept on its advancement, slow, terrible, and unstoppable, while Dean hedged backwards. He tripped over some exposed rebar, landed flat on his ass and decided to stay that way. “No -- I -- I don’t know, I’m sorry --” Dean wept “-- I’ll find him Dad, I promise -- I’ll find him --”

“No you won’t,” Jon still barked. “He’s gone. He’s GONE. And there’s nothing you can do about it, Dean -- nothing you can do to stop it. You FAILED. AGAIN. GAH--”

Dean blinked as a clean slice appeared in his father’s chest, and the vision swirled and vanished into smoke. Castiel stood behind where he had been, white as a ghost and panting, crowbar clutched in both hands. The smoke -- there was no other way to describe it, the smoke _screamed_ and swirled in a hurricane of night around them, dissipating back into the eaves. Castiel rushed to where Dean still lay prone, face buried in his hands and whimpered apologies on his lips, but before he could reach him some force propelled him backwards, sent him spinning to his knees and pinned him there.

Icy fear clawed again through Castiel’s heart, but this time he was prepared for it. He clenched his teeth, forced himself to his feet, dropped the crowbar, and reached into his coat for the silver blade.

Viscous, oily, the shadows billowed towards him, but they did not coalesce before him. A nebulous cloud, a shade, a figure of swirling night. Castiel could hear a buzzing like bees, like static, like a bad feedback loop, but still he stood his ground.. Even as tendrils stretched out to encircle him at wrist, elbow, knee and throat, he stood his ground.

_“Cas!”_

The cries of his name were distant, distorted through the white noise. Cas didn’t listen. He crouched like a coiled spring and let the thing advance to consume him. He had to get closer. He had to see --

As thing engulfed him, he knew. He _knew._

And as soon as he knew, he struck.

One deep hard jab of the knife into the deepest part of the shade, and the static turned to screams. From out of the shadows pierced blinding rays of light, ripping the shade to shreds and banishing it into the far corners. The thing kept screaming as Castiel twisted the knife. The tendrils reeled away, sucked back into their mother shadow, revealing Castiel, a radiant figure in the light of the blade, with his face a twisted grimace of determination, and then --

The shadow fled into the ordinary darkness. They could hear its shrill shrieks for long minutes, fading piece by piece.

Castiel's boots scraped as he staggered more upright. He still had the blade in his white-knuckled grip. From across the room he and Dean stared at each other, sharing a moment of shock, triumph. Castiel tried to grin -- but it clouded over as his eyes rolled in his skull, and he fell, like a puppet with its strings cut.

Dean was there to catch him before he hit the ground.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Get ready folks. Note the tags. Today, we truly earn our rating. ;D
> 
> This will be the second to last chapter, and the final chapter will be somewhat shorter than the rest -- it was either that or make this one nearly twice as long. o.o

_“... I can’t, Sam. I can’t -- with him. Because if I do... I’ll never know if what I feel is real or if it’s just -- how I was -- written....”_

Through the deep, dark waters of unconsciousness, Castiel could hear a voice... he knew that voice... disconnected snippets of conversation. 

_“....Dean -- you do have free will! You said it yourself, we’re not in his story anymore....”_

Slowly, slowly, Castiel swam upwards, the echoing darkness around him lightening, lightening.

_“I’m not just going to be his puppet, Sam.”_

_“Do you think he wants that? Honestly, Dean, tell me -- do you think he wants that either?”_

_“......... No.” A sigh. “No, I don’t.”_

Cas pulled his eyelids open just a sliver, enough to peer through his own eyelashes. He saw an extreme close-up of his own couch cushion. Beyond that his coffee table, his records, the rest of his apartment -- but he couldn’t see the brothers.

Then Sam’s voice floated from the kitchen behind him, soft, almost cajoling. “I just don’t want you to miss out on something really good because of something neither of you had any control over.”

“What about the rest of it? With Mom and -- and Dad, and you and -- all of that was his idea in the first place. Can you forgive him for that?” Dean -- he was still stubborn, digging his heels in, but at least he was listening.

“If we’re gonna move forward from here, we can’t think of it that way. It happened to us. It’s our life.” Silence for a few moments. “You have to admit, it makes a pretty good story.”

Dean huffed and didn’t answer.

“Look. Just talk to him. Okay?”

“... Yeah, we’ll see.”

Castiel blinked, breathing in a deep waking breath. He ached in every part of his body from his hands to his ribs to his feet and behind his eyes. That first deep breath caught sharp in his lungs and he coughed, wretched, painful.

“Hey.” Sam had come around the couch, grinning a cautious grin. Dean was following. “You had us worried there.”

Cas couldn’t come up with a suitable reply, so he just shifted his shoulder in the sofa and grimaced his eyes closed again.

“You feeling okay?” Sam asked. “Need anything? Coffee?”

“No, thank you.” Even to his own ears his voice sounded like broken glass.

Dean loomed over him at the foot of the sofa, arms still crossed and face pinched tight. Guarded. Pensive. “What happened back there?” he asked. “Did you kill it?”

Castiel closed his eyes hard, and felt his head start to swim back down toward unconsciousness again so he blinked them open and pulled himself up on his elbows. “No,” he said. “But I -- I frightened it.”

Dean’s eyebrow climbed. “You frightened a literal fear spirit?”

“We had a moment of... connection. Communion. It knows who I am, and it’s -- it’s scared of its creator,” Cas said, “Because I’m the only one who can end it.”

“Come again?” Sam had his head cocked to one side. “You think you know how to kill it?”

Cas shook his head. “I didn’t say kill it. I said end it. I have to -- define it. Give it a shape.” With great wincing effort, Castiel pulled himself up into a sitting position. “The story wasn’t finished when I ripped it out. That’s what’s causing all the trouble. I have to finish the story.” With that, Cas lurched off the couch with an eye toward his writing nook and the journal. He barely made it half a step around the coffee table before his legs shook and Dean stepped into his path.

“Ohhh no you don’t, not right now,” he said.

Castiel swayed where he stood, but held his ground. “Dean, I’m --”

“You’re not fine, so don’t even try to say you are.” Dean pressed his lips into a tight line and herded Cas back down onto the sofa. It didn’t take much effort. “Look, I admire your guts, but there’s no way of knowing what will happen once you start writing in that journal again. What if that thing busts through a window and blows you right over, huh?”

“You’re in shock,” Sam said. “And you’re exhausted. You need rest.”

Castiel hadn’t wanted to admit the weariness in his bones nor how lightheaded he’d felt when he stood up. His shoulders sagged. “What if it goes after someone else?” he asked. “I don’t want another death on my conscience. Especially not when I know how to defeat it.”

Dean nodded like he understood perfectly, but what came out of his mouth was: “Whatever you did tonight was more effective than anything else we’ve tried so far. Maybe it’ll stay out of trouble for the night.”

“I don’t like maybes,” Cas grumbled.

Dean shrugged. “Sometimes it’s all we got.”

Castiel scowled at Dean and nearly submitted, but then -- “No. I started this. I’m going to finish it. As soon as possible.” But when he moved to stand again and Dean pushed him back down with a hand on his shoulder, it took far less effort to keep him sitting than he would have liked.

“Look. You’re injured, okay?” Dean told him. “Just because it’s not something that needs stitches doesn’t mean you can just bounce back. We could all do with a rest, honestly. So just. Sit down.”

Castiel met his gaze defiantly for a moment, then acquiesced, dropping to look at Dean’s hand still on his shoulder and then back up at Dean. Dean removed it hastily and determinedly did not blush.

“I’ll keep an eye on the EMF tracker,” Sam said. “If it shows up again, we can fend it off, keep people from getting hurt.”

Cas squinted at him, trying to find a flaw in the plan... but his exhaustion was catching up with him. With a slump and a sigh, he let his eyes fall closed, and nodded.

“Great. Let’s get you into bed so we can wake up tomorrow and get this over with.” And with that, Dean was hauling him to his feet by the arms and steering him towards the bedroom.

The room was dark, but his eyes caught and stuck on the crumpled shape of a towel on the floor near the foot of the bed. When he realized what it was, his heart sank through his stomach. It was Dean’s towel from after his shower, the towel he’d been wearing when Castiel had kissed him. It seemed like another lifetime, a whole different Castiel who had drawn Dean to the sofa, touched him... Castiel swallowed on the feelings that welled up within him -- loss. Shame. Yearning. If he’d been honest from the start, maybe -- but now --

He wrenched his gaze back over to the unmade bedclothes. It looked like heaven, so he dove straight into the softness of pillows and sheets with a long sigh.

“Nuh-uh, no falling asleep yet,” said Dean. Cas startled -- he hadn’t realized Dean was still there. Dean urged him over on his back and dropped to his knees in front of him, and Cas felt a crazy leap of adrenaline seeing him there. But he was just removing Castiel’s shoes. So he could sleep. As if he were a child or an invalid.

“I can take off my own shoes, you know,” Castiel bristled.

“Yeah, well. Tough,” Dean said, standing up. “You can handle your own pants though.” The light was dim, but he thought he saw a ruddy flush staining Dean’s cheeks as he turned away. Cas tried not to think about what he was doing as he unbuttoned and pushed off his jeans before pulling the blankets over himself.

His bed really did feel like heaven. Had he ever more fully appreciated the softness of his pillow? The crisp sheets and swaddling weight of his quilt? He sighed into the pillowcase and snuggled deeper into his comfort.... but something poked at his brain, keeping him from dropping off as he so desperately wanted to do. He cracked one eye open.

Dean was still there, half in and half out of the room, leaning on the doorway and silhouetted in dim light. Cas couldn’t see his face -- just the tense line of his shoulders and the nervous clenching of his fist at his side. He could hear him breathing.

Castiel waited, anxious hope weaving a painful knot in his chest, watching Dean dither. “You just gonna stand there all night?” he asked, finally.

Dean let out a long breath, and then slowly, deliberately, moved back inside the room and shut the door. In the darkness Castiel listened to him shuffle the few steps toward the bed, then felt the mattress dip with his weight. After a long moment just listening to each other breathing, Dean broke the silence. “I, uh. Just wanted to say thanks.”

Cas squinted into the pillow. “What for?”

“For your help tonight, and the last few days. For -- I dunno. Dreaming us up? Accidentally bringing me to life?”

Castiel snorted. “I thought you didn’t want to be brought to life.”

“Where’d you get that idea?”

“You seemed pretty upset with the life I gave you.” No, he wasn’t pouting. Not at all. Well. Not much.

Dean was quiet for a minute, and Cas could feel him tensing up. Castiel sat up and turned on the bedside lamp, both of them blinking in the sudden yellowy glow. “People in stories have weird, crappy lives, Dean,” he said, soft. “There’s nothing interesting about happy, successful people being happy and successful.”

Dean was nodding. “Yeah, I get that. It’s -- It’s not fair of me to put that all on you. And it’s not going to help from here on out. Whether we like it or not, we’re here, and in every way that matters, my life is just... my life. I’m just gonna have to get on with it.”

“It’s not all bad, is it?” Castiel asked. “At least you get to be a hero. Save the world.”

Dean huffed, not quite a laugh. “Yeah. No pressure, right?”

Castiel sighed. “I am sorry that I wasn’t honest with you, Dean. I should have told you from the start.”

“Yeah, you should have. But I get why you didn’t.” Dean looked down at Cas, brought one knee up on the bed and turned to face him more fully, fidgeting with his fingernails. “This -- the way we’re gonna get this thing. You have to finish your story... right?”

Cas nodded slowly. “That’s the general idea, yes.”

Dean chewed on his lip. “Well. That means -- you’ll be finishing our story too. So. What if.” He took a deep breath. “What if that ends all of it? What if we disappear too?”

Iron weight settled in Castiel’s limbs. “Do -- do you think that’s likely?”

Dean shrugged. “Odds are better with this than with that spell your brother found, but it’s a possibility,” he said. “Maybe I’m just being pessimistic. But -- well, you know my life. Worst case scenario is usually what ends up happening.”

“But this isn’t your life,” Castiel said, sitting up a little straighter. “It’s mine. We don’t know how this is going to play out.”

“You’re right, we don’t.” Somehow when Dean said it there was an air of finality that Cas didn’t like. Dean swept a hand over his face. “Look,” he said, “I don’t know if I’m... real, or whatever. I’m not even sure what that question means. But I know how I -- how I feel about you. And I don’t want to question that anymore. I’ve been going back and forth on it all day, whether it’s ‘real’ or if it’s just, I dunno, some kind of programming, and you know what I’ve got to show for it? A headache.” He huffed and shook his head. “I’m done trying to sort it out. I’m gonna feel however it is I feel, and I just want to get back to -- what we were doing before, y’know?”

“You’re not saying you forgive me, are you?” Cas asked, a skeptical eyebrow raised.

And there it was -- a dimple in Dean’s cheek, a sparkle in his eye. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I am.”

Castiel shook his head. “Dean, you don’t have to do this.”

“I know I don’t. If I thought I had to do it, I wouldn’t be here. Just... if this is my last night alive, I don’t want to spend it being pissed at you.”

Cas arched an eyebrow at Dean. “Is this you giving yourself the last night on earth speech?”

Dean laughed. “Yeah. I guess I am.” He smiled down at Cas with such warmth, Castiel felt himself start to melt. With a toss of his head Dean asked “So? Can I get in?”

Cas looked at him for a long moment, desire warring with guilt, hope against fear. Finally he took a deep breath and scooted over under the covers. “Boots off,” he said.

Dean snorted and rolled his eyes. “Fucking duh, Einstein,” he said, and kicked off his boots. His hands only hesitated for a moment before following the boots with jeans and his extra layers of shirt; Castiel tried very hard to keep control of his breathing around the swelling heat in his stomach. He held back the covers and Dean sank into the warmth under them, still keeping a good six inches of bed between them. They stared at each other across the gulf in silence.

“Are you afraid?” Cas finally asked.

“Of what?”

“Of the possibility that you might --” Cas buttoned his lips for a moment, then sighed. “Of dying.”

Dean just looked at him for a long moment. “No,” he said at last.

Cas blinked, his brow drawing in, but Dean continued. “Not in the way you mean it,” he said. “I don’t want to die, obviously, but I’m not afraid. What I am afraid of is --” A tight swallow. “Losing this. Losing you. Before I’ve even really had a chance to know you.”

Castiel couldn’t hide his smirk. “You want to know me?” he asked. “Biblically?”

Dean’s face crinkled up in a laugh and he hid it in the pillow; Castiel’s stomach dipped with affection. “Well, yeah. I thought that was kind of obvious.” When Dean looked back up from the pillow some of the tension had eased from his shoulders. He shifted fractionally closer to Cas, and Cas reached out with his palm flat to the mattress to let the tips of his smallest fingers touch the fabric of Dean’s T-shirt. Dean leaned forward, and soon he could feel the heat of Dean’s forehead nearly brushing his. One subtle nudge and they rested on each other, breathing the same air.

“So,” Dean asked, low in their quiet space. “Wish fulfillment, eh?”

Castiel laughed, his pulse stuttering. “Maybe a little.”

“What wishes, exactly, was I fulfilling?”

Suddenly Castiel couldn’t get enough air. “Oh, you know. The usual. Making me breakfast in the morning. Hogging my blankets while I’m trying to sleep. Having truly mind-blowing sex.”

“I think you’ve got those backwards,” Dean murmured, his voice sounding somehow closer than before. “Shouldn’t it be sex, then sleeping, then breakfast?”

“We can try it both ways,” Cas suggested. Dean laughed again and this time he buried it in the hollow of Castiel’s throat, and with that the last of the walls between them fell to pieces. Cas brought his arms around Dean’s broad shoulders, holding him close, letting him in. He was warm, so warm through their shirts. He could feel Dean’s heartbeat thudding against his side, strong and quickening; he let his hands roam over the expanse of his muscular back, following the defined and shifting lines. When Dean’s head lifted just a fraction of an inch, it was to press dry, nuzzling kisses to the line of his neck. Castiel clutched him harder, angling his head up, holding his breath against the shivers that raced along his skin. Dean bumped his nose and lips up Castiel’s neck, his jaw, his chin, and then Cas was looking into wide, jade green eyes from the distance of a whisper.

When their lips met, it was like a shock up a Jacob’s ladder from his lips to his curling toes. Dean’s plush lips moved against his, sweet and soft, and Cas bowed into the solid heat of him. Dean rumbled low, deep in his chest, and it reverberated right into Castiel’s heart. He opened to him, licking between Dean’s lips and teeth, flicking his tongue against Dean’s and sliding in to taste that rumbling groan for himself; Dean met him with a surge forward, opening them both wider, slick and hot. Suddenly Cas needed -- _needed_ to feel Dean’s weight on top of him, pressing him down. He rolled to his back, keeping his grip on Dean firm and unshakable, until Dean got the idea and crawled on top of him, one knee slotting between Cas’s thighs. Their lips slipped in the shuffle, and in their attempts to re-align, their noses knocked painfully. “Ow,” Cas said, squinting.

Dean burst into laughter, bending again to press his grin to Castiel’s chest. “So much for smooth,” he giggled. Cas just hummed and let his hands move restlessly over Dean’s shoulders, his shirt rucking and bunching between his hands and Dean’s smooth skin. The feeling of Dean’s breath on the skin of his neck sent gooseflesh down his arm and shoulder; he squirmed as Dean’s lips brushed the spot under his ear.

When he reached the collar of Cas’s shirt, Dean looked up. “May I?” he asked, tugging at the hem.

Cas took one look at him, eyes wide and open, and said “Only if you return the favor.”

Dean grinned and hauled his shirt up over his head while Cas did likewise. When they came back together it was a thousand times more intense. Cas could feel where his skin sparked against Dean’s, their bellies brushing softly and the smooth curve of Dean’s shoulders bare under his hands. The tops of them were sprayed with starbursts of freckles, and Cas opened his mouth to press his teeth there, wanting to leave his own mark on that skin. Dean apparently had the same instinct, latching his mouth just above Castiel’s collarbone, and the tooth-edged suction spread warmth down into him like slowly melting chocolate. He let his hands roam and his pulse race; his breath came in gasps as the heat in his belly pooled hotter and hotter. Dean’s hips were shifting, nudging at his thighs, so he parted them to let Dean settle there and squeezed him tight with his knees. But Dean was keeping his hips back, a polite few inches of space between their groins; Cas would have none of that. He rolled his hips up once, experimental, and his own half-hard cock pressed against Dean’s with nothing but two pairs of boxers between them. He gasped, a breathy “Fuck yes,” as his toes curled and the heat in his belly boiled over. Dean groaned against his neck and pressed back into him, a hard push of hips. Cas let his hands wander further, fingertips slipping in a light sheen of sweat in the dip of Dean’s spine on their way to the edge of his boxers. He didn’t go under them yet -- just gripped two hands full of Dean’s ass cheeks and pulled him in tight.

“God, Cas --” Dean sighed, stoking the fires between them with needy little rolls of his hips.

Cas could _feel_ Dean’s cock getting harder, lengthening against his own; he let his head fall back on the pillow and his thighs splay wider, eager to grant Dean access. “Dean -- Fuck --” 

“Jesus,” Dean trembled against him, then pushed up and off but didn’t go far enough for Cas to lament the loss. He knelt between Cas’s spread thighs, tracing his fingers up and down his chest and the skin of his stomach. Dean’s face was flushed, his lips swollen and slick and his eyes bright. Cas felt his heart lurch and he wanted so badly to be kissing Dean again, he felt the loss keenly in his lips. He was parched, thirsty for Dean. But Dean, with a mischievous smirk, was bending to work those lips down Cas’s stomach, nosing at the edge of his boxer briefs.

“Ohhhh yes...” Cas groaned, lifting his hips toward the hot breaths he could feel painting over his belly, bleeding through his underwear to his cock.

“Can I --?” Dean started to ask, fingers hooked in the elastic, but Cas cut him off by lifting his hips and shoving his boxers down and off himself. Dean’s eyes went wide, lust naked on his face. He licked his lips and slid his hands up Castiel’s thighs first outside, then inside, coming up to cup his bare cock. Cas hissed through his teeth and pushed up into Dean’s hands, his skin crackling with pleasure. He watched as Dean licked his lips, focused on Cas’s cock. He leaned forward slowly, teasing, meeting Cas’s gaze as he flicked his tongue over the swelling head.

Cas jerked. “Ah! Oh Dean...” then carded one hand over Dean’s hair, gripped as much as he could in the short strands while Dean slid his foreskin up and down over the sensitive head, teasing with his lips and little flicks of his tongue. Cas’s hips moved in restless little jerks, responsive to the teasing, and a long whine escaped his throat. This went on for long minutes -- far too long if you asked Cas -- before he thumped his fist down on the mattress and moaned “For the love of God Dean are you going to suck my cock or not??”

~*~

Sam wasn’t listening. Really. But he wasn’t, y’know, NOT listening. So when he heard that very telling question echo out of the bedroom, he stuttered into wide-eyed laughter, shook his head, and stuck his earbuds in his ears.

~*~

Dean burst out in a laugh against the warm crease of Castiel’s groin. But he rallied quickly, and slid Cas’s cock allllll the way into his wet mouth, and oh. _Oh,_ it was so good. Cas’s hands came to rest on Dean’s head, petting gently behind his ears. He tried not to thrust up into the wet, silken heat, the friction of tongue and careful scratch of teeth, but all his best intentions went out the window when Dean wiggled around a little, positioning himself just right, and then his throat just _opened_ for him and he couldn’t stop the roll of his hips any more than he could stop a freight train. A groan tore from Cas’s throat, echoed deep and muffled in Dean’s. He could feel it as Dean sank further, pushing straight past his gag reflex into his throat -- Cas whimpered and just pushed a little more. When Dean pulled off, there was a tear in his eye, but he was grinning like a lust-drunk madman.

“Hey Cas,” he murmured against the head of Cas’s dick. “Wanna fuck my face?”

Cas’s eyes went wide. When Dean went down again, barely blinking away from eye contact, Cas pushed up a time or two, experimental. When the head of his cock bumped the back of Dean’s throat, Dean’s eyelids fluttered closed and he moaned, just a breathy little thing. So Cas did it again.

A few moments of this and Dean pulled off, pinching the tender bottom curve of Cas’s asscheek. “C’mon,” he growled, “You can do better than that.”

Oh, was that how he wanted to play? Fire blazed in Castiel’s limbs. That was a game he could fucking play.

With both hands Cas gripped Dean’s head, one at the back of his neck and the other snarled in his hair. The moment Dean’s mouth was open, Cas was thrusting inside, feeling a jittery scrape where Dean didn’t have time to get his teeth out of the way. Dean’s eyes went wide in surprise, then fluttered closed. Cas pushed _deep_ , merciless, until Dean’s nose was once again buried in the curls at the base of his cock and he was struggling not to gag -- then he pulled back only to push in again. Again, and again, all the way to the root, each thrust quicker, more rough-edged. Then he pulled Dean off, letting him get a few heaving breaths against the head of Cas’s cock. When Dean looked up at Cas, his eyes were fever-bright and wet, but he just opened his lips again, ready and waiting for Cas to take his mouth. Over and over and over, Castiel fucked deep into Dean’s throat, a handful of desperate fucks and then pulled back to let Dean breathe. Each time, Dean painted swirls over the head of Cas’s cock with his eager tongue and swollen lips. Each time Dean swallowed him back down with hungry moans. Castiel did this until Dean’s face was flushed blood-red, tears streaming from his eyes, until Cas felt the boiling heat in his gut sharpen and seize. With a hiss he pulled Dean off and let go, hips arching in search of heat. Dean just flopped onto Cas’s thigh, panting and exhausted but grinning, staring up at Cas’s throbbing erection -- god he was so hard he felt about to split his skin -- shining with his own spit.

“You’ve got one hell of a dick,” he said, and his voice sounded so rough, abused.

“Thank you,” Cas said through heaving breaths.

“I kind of want it inside me,” Dean murmured against a mouthful of Cas’s thigh. Cas whined as another arrow of want pulsed in his cock.

“Then you really shouldn’t have let me fuck your face,” he said. His hips were still shifting in tight, needy little rolls; he felt ready to come if Dean so much as breathed on him just right.

Dean laughed against his mouthful of skin -- god bless that boy’s oral fixation -- then turned his huge green eyes up at Cas and said “Can I fuck you, then?”

“Fuck yes --” Cas moaned and pointed to the bedside drawer. “Lube.”

“Eager sonuvabitch aren’t you?” Dean grinned, and scrambled up to the drawer.

“That is entirely your fault right now. Check the condoms, they might be expired.”

Dean opened the drawer and shook his head again at the contents. “I still can’t believe one person can use this many dildos,” he said.

Castiel just shrugged against the pillows. “I know what I like, and I like a lot of things.”

Dean grabbed the lube and the condoms -- they were fine -- then sat on his knees between Castiel’s legs and gingerly eased his boxers down. Cas’s mouth watered at the sight -- he was hard as a rock, his cock standing thickly from his body and curving up toward his belly. He actually felt his legs spread further, involuntarily, at the sight. “Ohhhh fuck you’re amazing,” he moaned.

Dean grinned and shrugged one shoulder. “I like getting my face fucked,” he said.

“No complaints,” Cas murmured as Dean discarded his boxers. “Can I put the condom on you?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Dean breathed.

Cas sat up with a roguish grin and took Dean’s cock in hand, just saying hello. Dean’s eyes fluttered shut and he swallowed. The weight of him was pleasant in Cas’s hand -- thick. Warm. Hard, so hard. He squeezed a stroke from base to tip just to hear Dean gasp.

“Careful,” he whispered.

Cas left off with a grin and a swipe of his thumb over the dewy tip, then liberated a condom from the packaging. He popped it in his mouth, scooted down, and let his lips and tongue do the work, unrolling the condom as he slid down. Dean gasped and swore above him, hands clenching on Castiel’s shoulders. By the time Cas sat up with a pleased smirk, Dean was panting and trembling finely, staring at him like he’d just invented sliced bread.

“Damn,” he sighed.

Cas just smirked and re-positioned himself, pushing one pillow under his hips and curling his fingers around his cock, giving himself just a little squeeze. “I don’t need much prep,” he said.

Dean barely looked like he was breathing as he slid his hands up Cas’s thighs again, scraping trails of fire and pleasure with his fingernails. “With a toy collection like that, I don’t doubt it,” he said.

“Wanna try one?” Cas asked.

Dean looked briefly tempted but he shook his head and reached for the lube. “Maybe next time,” he said, and squirted a dollop of lube on his fingers.

Anticipation flared hot in Cas’s belly, and he hooked his arms under his knees and pulled his legs back -- farther than he really needed to, just to watch Dean bite his lip at the spectacle. Then Dean loomed over him and he felt the blunt tips of his fingers against his hole, circling once, twice, then two fingers twisted and pressed inexorably, until they were two knuckles deep. Castiel clenched and released, his mouth falling open in a silent gasp as hot pressure pulled him under. “Oh yes, fuck -- _Dean._ ” He rocked his hips, driving Dean’s fingers home, and Dean dropped his forehead down against Cas’s chest.

“Jesus -- Cas. Fuck.” A few moments of this, crooking and twisting and spreading lube and --

“That’s fine, Dean. Please,” Cas gasped.

“You sure?” Dean asked. “I feel like I just --”

“Yes. Dean. Fuck me. Right now or I will throw you down and do it myself,” Cas gasped, still pushing up with his hips in demanding circles.

Dean’s pupils blew wide and he breathed out “Promise?”

With a growl Cas clamped his thighs and arms tight around Dean, who barely had time to remove his fingers before he was being rolled, pressed into the mattress, borne down by Castiel’s weight, the press of his hands, the cage of his legs. Cas lifted himself on powerful thighs, reached down to line up Dean’s cock, and sank --

“ _Fuck,_ god --”

“Oh -- Oh yes, _Dean--_ ” they both moaned, and then Cas was fully seated with his ass on Dean’s hips, a blissful open-mouthed smile on his face. Dean’s fingers clutched tight at Cas’s sharp hipbones, digging in, keeping a tight rein on his hips which wanted to buck and push and fuck.

“Fuck,” he panted again. “Fucking -- tight -- you sure you’re ok?”

“Oh yes. More than ok,” Cas murmured.

“Then fucking MOVE already would ya?” Dean growled, getting his feet under him and using the leverage to plow upwards into Cas’s tight heat.

Cas gasped, eyes wide, then he planted his palms on Dean’s shoulders and drove his hips back onto Dean’s cock. Heat and pleasure wildfired through him at the stretch, deep and thick; he felt as if he was boiling, molten on the inside, skin crackling with energy. His hands roved all over Dean’s shoulders and chest, scratching fine white lines, tweaking hard nipples, all to Dean’s chorus of whimpers and whines and pleas through bitten lips. Cas leaned down to capture his abused mouth, licking his way inside with one hand at the back of Dean’s neck tilting him just so. Dean moaned into the kiss, wrapping his arms tight around Cas’s shoulders and waist, sliding one hand through the sweat on his back, down between his cheeks to touch the place where they were joined. He whined, high and tortured, and held Cas’s hips in a tight grip then to thrust up into him hard, fast, Cas just staying still for a moment to allow him.

Only for a moment though. Soon enough Cas broke back and sat up with a hand pinning Dean in the center of his chest. He moved in a deep, filthy grind that pressed Dean’s cock against every sweetest spot inside him. Then -- then one of Dean’s hands crept forward to pull at Cas’s turgid cock, and he gasped.

“I’m -- I’m close. Fuck. Dean --”

“I know,” Dean murmured. “Me too.” His hand moved over Cas’s cock in time with his grinds, and Cas whimpered. He could feel the pleasure sizzling through his veins, pounding in his belly, urgent and sharp where Dean’s cock speared into him. He clenched to make it sharper, and Dean swore -- Cas braced himself over Dean’s shoulders and they moved together, Dean thrusting up and Cas meeting him in a hot, slick rhythm, Dean’s hand on Cas’s cock slip-sliding in the precum leaking from the tip. Every thrust moved them both perfectly, soaring them higher and higher until --

“Oh -- Fuck -- OH -- DEAN --” Cas tripped over the edge first, fire scorching him from the inside out. Every muscle clenched tight, shuddering and shaking as he poured out his whole self over Dean. Dean, who was still moving inside him with quick, desperate fucks, still whimpering below him as Castiel endured the shockwaves of his pleasure. When he opened his eyes, he saw his own come spattered over Dean’s belly, his chest, and one glorious spurt that had landed on his lips, and now Dean was licking it off with a blissful expression, eyes delicately closed. Then his expression collapsed, his face hot-red, and with one final seizing thrust into Cas’s heat he peaked, silent before a broken groan and fevered panting tore from his throat. His fingers clenched tight on Cas’s hip and ass, almost painful, but Cas couldn’t bring himself to care. Not with blissful satisfaction seeping through him like warm honey. Not when those hands softened into long strokes up and down his flanks, pulling him to meet Dean’s lips in a kiss. They kissed long, languid, bringing each other gently back down to earth.

Eventually, Cas slipped off Dean’s cock with a short gasp and a boneless roll to the side, leaving Dean free to take care of some necessary tidying up. When he came back to bed it was to slide directly under Cas’s arm, tucking close, almost nose to nose. Cas opened his eyes and they traded fond, giddy smiles.

“Hey you,” Dean whispered.

“Hello, Dean.”

There were no words after that. Just the satisfied stillness between waking and sleep.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it you guys!
> 
> Thank you thank you thank you to anyone and everyone who has read, kudos'd, or commented (especially commented, comments are love) on this little beastie of mine. It's not much, but I'm proud of it.
> 
> Extra special thanks to Rosemoonweaver for the prompt and for my Casnatural family for being amazing. Truly. I have never felt more welcomed or at home in a fandom and I love you all. Thanks for being here with me.
> 
> Onwards!

October 31st

“You ready?”

“No. But... as ready as I’ll ever be.”

Sitting in the chair where it all began, Castiel was restless. Outside his window, the sky shone as clear and crystal blue as any autumn morning could hope for, with trees gleaming golden in the sunshine, rustling in a brisk breeze that tempted them through the window. Castiel twirled the pen between his fingers and ignored the blank page in front of him in favor of drinking in the beauty outside, breathing in deeply of the crisp air, absorbing the peace while he could.

Dean’s knee knocked into his under the table, a subtle intimacy, a supporting weight. He leaned into the pressure gratefully. Across from him, Sam was all encouragement and wry smiles.

Castiel drew in a deep, shaky breath. No more stalling. Time to put the nightmare back in the cage. He firmed his grip on the pen and pushed the nib into the blank page. He watched it make that first marring mark, interrupting the blankness, allowing for creation.

It was odd, trying to write with an audience. He took a few slow false starts before he was able to ignore his surroundings and let the words flow. He didn’t try to start the story immediately. Instead, he wrote about fear: Fear of loneliness. Fear of doing wrong, fear of doing _nothing_. Fear of obscurity. Fear of death. He wrote about the root of fear: desire. His desire to create something meaningful and the apprehension that all he would do would be to hammer out slag. The joy piercing his chest at Dean’s solid presence at his side and the hollow, nauseating terror that their connection would never have the chance to grow and blossom. He wrote of the guilt that clung to this fear like moss because all of this was his fault in the first place. Lives had ended because of his cowardice, his lack of confidence in his creation. He wrote about the nervous anxiety that all of this would backfire, that he was only creating a worse monster by spilling out his soul like this, and what would they do then? 

Outside, a few stray white wisps of cloud moved in front of the sun; the page darkened. Castiel had bent low, his nose barely two inches from the page, his loosened scrawl filling his field of vision. With a breath like a surfacing diver, he sat back and blinked at Sam and Dean for a few moments before closing his eyes. He was shaking and his heart was racing, but he could do this.

“You okay?” Dean asked.

Castiel nodded.

“You’re not finished, are you?” asked Sam.

“I haven’t even started,” he said, and reached again for the pen. With his heart thumping against his ribs and his fears fresh and ripe in his memory, he turned a page and set to the task of finishing what he’d begun.

It took hours. Every now and then he stopped to stretch out a cramp in his wrist or shoulder, but his gaze did not leave the page. A couple of times he rose to make a cup of coffee or tea, his eyes glassy and focusing on things that weren’t actually in front of him. Clouds rolled in patches and waves over the sun; the light of the room dimmed in shifting shafts from gold to silver.

Castiel wrote about deals made at crossroads; he wrote about children with tainted blood and visions of death. 

Dean made them lunch out of the ground beef he found in the fridge -- simple burgers, but they kept him busy while Castiel wrote. Sam spent most of the day on his laptop, growing increasingly fidgety.

He let them slay their family’s demon but like a hydra a thousand more appeared to take its place. He sent the man he loved to hell and he pulled him back out again. He took them straight to the devil’s doorstep.

The clouds thickened; Castiel shivered and Dean closed the window against the icy wind and threatening rain drops. Sam turned on a light, and Castiel blinked, shaking his head to clear his eyes. He hadn’t realized how dark the room had become until suddenly he could see the page again from further than six inches away. 

By the time Castiel sat up straight again, the rain was thick and heavy against the window, slow rolls of thunder washing over the world, and the peaceful blue and gold of the morning was a distant memory. Castiel sucked in a deep breath and let it out on a gusty sigh, and placed a period with some force at the end of the page. Then he stretched his shoulders and slumped in his chair, a little wild around the eyes.

“Finished?” Sam asked.

Castiel gave a shrugging nod. “It’s a rough draft at best, but it’ll do. Hang on.” Then he picked up the page and added the words at the bottom of the page:

T H E E N D

He looked up at Dean with an expression half nervous, half sad, and brother be damned Dean reached out to card his fingers through Cas’s rucked-up hair. When Castiel closed his eyes and leaned into the touch, Dean dropped a kiss to his forehead.

“So -- what now?” Dean asked after a long moment just standing there, enjoying the feel of Cas’s hair in his fingers.

Cas opened his eyes and pulled away slowly. “Time to make it real.” He picked up the journal, flipping back over the fat chunk of pages he’d written that day.

“I’ll watch the EMF,” Sam said, positioning himself behind the laptop. “If anything happens we’ll know where to go.”

Dean sat back down in the chair beside Castiel. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Whatever happens, we’ll take it on together.”

Cas swallowed, held Dean’s eyes for a few moments, took a few sheafs between his fingers. He bit his lip and raised his gaze to the ceiling, praying that this would work, and then -- a sharp shred of pages echoed through the room, loud and violet. He kept ripping until all the pages lay in a scatter on the floor.

Castiel stared at the pages, head cocked to the side. That’s that. He closed his eyes and reached out a hand to clasp Dean’s shoulder, still solid and real. His own shoulders sagged with relief. It may not have boded well for getting rid of the creature, but at least Dean and Sam were still here.

Dean covered Cas’s hand with his own, then glanced at Sam. “Anything?” he asked.

Sam started to shake his head, then sat up straighter. “Wait.”

The lights fritzed and flickered out.

The dim, stormy twilight filtering through the window was just enough to watch the pages on the floor start to shiver in an unfelt breeze. Icy chill pierced through Cas’s heart and lungs, stronger than ever, a knife carving sigils on the inside of his ribs. He felt Dean’s arms around him before he realized that he was falling, staggering into Dean’s hold as the pages swirled and swept up from the floor. The wind howled and whipped around them, a hurricane brought indoors; Sam stood as the lights began to burst in their sockets. Together they stood, staring own the eye of the storm.

And then -- all went quiet. The wind died; the papers stilled. The rain hammered at the window, the only light the gray square of the window and the dull gleam of white papers scratched with black.

Until a flicker of lightning flashed, illuminating a figure by the door where there had been no one. He stood, hands in his trenchcoat pockets, tie askew, hair wind-tossed, smirking before the room went back to pitch black.

“Hello, Castiel.” His voice was a burned rasp.

Cas swallowed, but stood up straight in the face of his mirror. A flare of a match -- Sam -- cast a red glow and jumping shadows over the figure’s face.

“Come on,” the other Castiel said, “This really can’t be that surprising. Mirror self? Facing your own demons? Have you ever written anything that wasn’t a cliche?”

“I didn’t write this,” Cas growled, half to the figure, half to Dean and Sam, still flanking him.

“Oh but you did!” The other Cas took a step forward, pointing up an accusing finger. “You poured your heart and soul into that claptrap you just tore up. Did you think you could actually shit out a decent story in a day?” He laughed and shook his head. His steps had brought him to the edge of the swirl of papers on the floor, and he smirked sown at them. “It’s all so MEANINGLESS, Castiel. Why even try? Why not give up? At the end of the day it’s all -” Step. “Just.” Step. “Pointless.” A page torn to wrinkled shreds under one heel.

“You shut up!” Dean yelled. Hawkish, the other Cas rounded on his new target.

“Oh, Dean! What a GOOD little attack dog you turned out to be!” The other Cas quipped. “Tell me -- how does it feel knowing you were created to be a sex toy? That everything you think and feel was put there by someone else? Oh wait --” the other Cas stopped and placed a finger to his chin, mocking thinking. “You should be used to that. Daddy’s good little soldier, never questioned an order in your life. You’ll be fine.” 

“Don’t!” Sam barked, low, dangerous, and Castiel heard the click of a revolver cocking. The Colt.

But the other Cas just stared at Sam and the gun in his hand, and started to laugh, high-pitched giggles. “Oh my god, how adorable!” he said, his voice going shrill and piping like Cas’s never was. He turned back to his creator. “Did you actually think your little toy gun could kill me? Spoilers, buddy boy -- that’s a lot like shooting your TV with a popgun and expecting Roy Rogers to take the hit. Okay? You got it?” The other Cas advanced on the three of them with cold fury in his eyes. Wings of shadow stretched out behind him, huge and dark, up the walls, arching overhead, the space stretching with a crack and creak of timbers to accommodate his looming force. “You. Can’t. Kill. Me.” He ended nose to nose with Castiel; Cas stood his ground. “I am a part of you,” whispered low.

Castiel’s breath came quick, but his voice was steady and his eyes were steel. “Are you the one responsible for all those people dying?”

The mirror cracked in a sadistic giggle. “Oh, sweetie. That really should have been your very first question. Yes -- I killed them. Because they were so --” he inhaled deeply, like sampling a fine bouquet. “Easy. It was so _easy_ , you really have no _idea_ how easy. Their fears were right there on the surface, right under their skin. But you.” He stopped and pointed a finger at Castiel, barely a centimeter from his nose. Beside him, Dean twitched. “You were more difficult. So thank you, Castiel. My esteemed author.” He placed a hand to his own breast and gave a small mocking bow. “You gave me the pieces I was missing. You gave me yourself. And now --” he shrugged, nonchalant. “Now I’m your worst nightmare.”

A flash of silver and Dean lunged, the silver blade in his grip, aiming for the neck, but the mirror of Cas merely flicked his wrist and sent Dean flying shoulder-first into the wall. Dean fell to the floor but scrambled to his feet quickly, blade still clutched in his hand.

A crack of gunfire split the air and left all their ears ringing; Sam glared along the barrel of the smoking Colt as a the other Cas rocked backward from the bullet to the chest. But he just stared, first at the should-have-been-fatal gunshot wound that didn’t even bleed, then back up at Sam, incredulous. “I wasn’t bluffing,” he said. His sneer became a snarl as he lunged at Sam. Sam dodged toward the kitchen, and when the creature overbalanced Dean leaped onto the thing’s back, blade at his throat, legs around the creatures waist, pulling his head back by the hair to expose his neck to the blade’s edge.

“I know this can hurt you!” Dean growled in his ear.

The thing just laughed, a loud hysterical bark. “You think _that’s_ what happened back there? Oh baby, you’ve got a lot to learn.” And with that the creature wrenched around, throwing Dean off his back and onto the floor. The blade fell at Castiel’s feet.

Sam charged in, aiming his shoulder straight into the creature’s stomach; he barreled the thing backwards and toppled him to the floor. The thing’s head hit shelf of records with a solid THUNK and a shower of vinyl sleeves; when the mirror Cas opened his eyes they could all see the ominous black void within, just for a moment before he blinked back to human blue. He grinned. “Get it? Personal demons?” Like it was the funniest joke on the planet. He lurched to his feet, toe to toe with Sam, but then --

“Stop it.”

Cas -- the real Cas -- stood with the point of the blade trained on the creature, inches from his nose. The point of the blade trembled, but Cas held the creature’s sneering gaze with deadly calm.

“Or what? You’ll kill me? You should know better by now.”

“No,” Cas murmured low, almost a whisper. He stepped forward until the point of the blade snugged up under the creature’s windpipe. “I know this won’t hurt you. I know I can’t kill you. But -- But I can do this.” And with that, Cas lowered the blade, dropped it to the floor between their feet.

The other Cas gave a confused giggle, high-pitched and strange. “What?”

“You’re part of me,” Cas murmured. “And I need you. Trying to deny you or drive you out -- it doesn’t work. We -- we can both be better together.”

The other Cas laughed again, shrill. Nervous. “You think just because I’m some sort of mirror-you cliche that you can just --”

Castiel pressed forward, took his mirror self in his arms, bending toward him with purpose. The other Cas’s eyes went huge and shocked as Castiel took his jaw in one hand 

“No,” the mirror Cas whimpered, tears welling from the corners of both eyes. “No you won’t --”

Castiel brought their lips together in a tenderly desperate kiss. It was a kiss of apology for years of denial, of hiding. It was a kiss of acceptance, a promise to do better. To be better. To use his fear rather than run from it. Slowly, with whimpers and diminishing struggles, his mirror’s body sagged into the welcoming weight of Cas’s embrace; they opened to each other. Cas’s mirror started to glow, a subtle golden-silver from the collar and sleeves, then under his eyelids, at the seam of his lips where they were open to Castiel’s kiss. The glow overtook his skin and his hair, the borders of his coat. He glowed like a sunrise, banishing the dark until Dean and Sam were forced to shield their eyes. When the blinding light faded, Castiel stood alone in the center of the room, eyes closed and hands clenching on air.

“Cas?” Dean asked after a moment. “You okay?”

Cas opened his eyes with a few long, slow blinks. He turned on unsteady feet to look at Dean, moving and breathing as if he were trying with each step to remember how it was done. But when he turned to meet Dean’s eyes, he smiled a little, open-mouthed and dazed.

“It’s over,” he said.

~*~

Nov 1st

The next morning found them in the street outside Castiel’s apartment. The rain-washed world was peachy and clean around them, slowly waking up in the late sunrise. A single golden leaf drifted down from the tree to light on the hood of the Impala.

“I think that’s everything,” Sam said, slinging his laptop bag into the back seat.

Dean leaned against the driver’s side door, arms crossed and clearly trying to pretend that this was just another morning, hitting the road with his brother. He failed miserably. His mouth was pressed in a tight line. His eyes flickered from Castiel to the road under his shoes and back again.

“Where will you go?” Cas asked. “What will you do?”

Dean shrugged. “Same thing we’ve always done I guess.”

“But there aren’t ghosts or demons or monsters in this reality,” Cas said. “I made them up.”

“Well, that book of yours was real enough. Who knows what else might be out there?”

“Besides,” Sam said from the other side of the car. “While I was doing research in the library I came across some lore I’d like to look into. Might be a little different from what we’re used to, but --” he spread his hands. “We’ve got time to learn.”

Cas nodded, his eyes falling to the ground between his shoes and the toes of Dean’s boots.

“What are you going to do with that journal anyway?” Dean asked.

“Keep it, probably,” Cas said with a shrug. “It will certainly make grocery shopping a lot easier.”

Dean laughed, looking away briefly, and Cas wanted so badly to bring him close, to kiss the dimples in his cheeks, to lean in close to watch his eyes light up. He dug his fingernails into his palms to stop himself.

“Yeah, well -- be sure to keep some of those apples around, will ya? In case we’re ever in the neighborhood?” There was nervous hope in Dean’s words and Cas heard the real question: Can I see you again? It twisted in his heart but he smiled and nodded.

“Of course, Dean,” he said. Dean’s lips curled up in a soft, barely-there smile, one made just for Cas. 

“Hey, Cas --” Sam’s voice cut through the moment. “You, uh. You wanna come with us?”

Dean whirled around to stare, gobsmacked, at his brother’s cheeky grin. “Sam!...?”

“What? It was your idea,” Sam smirked.

“Yeah, but that was --” Sam ended their conversation by sliding into the shotgun seat, still grinning. Dean turned back to Cas with a blush and a tentative smile.

Cas tried to slow his racing heart, calm his breathing, tame the hope that fluttered in his ribcage. “Would you want that, Dean?”

Dean shrugged again. “It’s not a glamorous life,” he said. “And it’s not easy. There’s a lot of getting your ass handed to you, and on the days you don’t almost die it’s pretty much just boring. And the pay is -- nonexistent, really. And no one really says thank you because most people don’t know you’ve done anything.”

Cas nodded. “Sounds a lot like writing, for the most part. Except for the almost dying. Recent events notwithstanding.” Cas swallowed, then let a slow grin work its way over his face. He stepped close, lifted his chin, brushed the tips of their noses together, moving in slowly for a long, passionate kiss. Dean’s arms locked tight around his waist and shoulders, pulling their bodies flush together. They held each other close, for a long time, secure in the knowledge that they would not have to let go.

~*~

Somewhere far across the country, a man with a scruff of beard set down his pen with a satisfied sigh. He took a sip of whiskey and flipped back through the pages he’d written. He was proud of this one. He might even turn it into a series: the adventures of Castiel Novak and the Brothers Winchester. 

With a grin, he picked up the leather-bound journal, took hold of a few pages, and began to rip.

**Author's Note:**

> To keep up to date and to read my occasional drabbles, find me as [Jemariel](https://jemariel.tumblr.com/) on tumblr!


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